Building a Custom Portal for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

So, what if you want to create Portal for your customers and you already use Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement? What technology should you chose? What will work best in what scenario? Do you want to build up-to-date modern user experience for your customer?

I’m Dynamics 365 technical architect with 12 years’ experience with this product working from the very first versions. We build a lot of fully custom portals as well as done a lot of customizations based on standard Microsoft Dynamics Portal.

Microsoft Dynamics Portal provided out-of-the-box do now work always as the best option for any case. We examined it in the previous article.

• However, what if you want to go far beyond functionality Microsoft Dynamics Portal provides?
• What if you have very specific UI requirements or what if you have a lot of integrations required?

So let me share our experience on building complicated high-load solutions on different technologies for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Therefore, in this particular article, we are talking about building a Portal solution from scratch.

You can also check my video on this topic:

Let’s review what are key advantages of this approach, what are concerns and what questions should you challenge to understand if custom portal works for you.

Key advantages and concerns

KEY ADVANTAGES

• High flexibility
• High performance
• Modern technologies and approaches
• More integration options
• More control over the solution roadmap and maintenance

KEY CONCERNS

• Maintenance and implementations costs
• Complexity of maintenance
• Feature delivery timeline

So, when to go with Custom Portal?

If you answer these questions positively this might be your choice:

• Do you have many users?
• Do you want modern solution on latest technologies and UX?
• Do you have enough budget to maintain development team costs?
• Do you have multiple software you need to integrate with?
• Do you have strict UI/UX or other requirements?

FRAMEWORKS AVAILABLE

• CMS based
• Backend (.Net Core, PHP, Python, Go…)
• Frontend (React, Angular, Vue, …)

Frameworks selection is out of the scope current discussion. But in case you want more details on this — please contact us.

Final thoughts

So, if you have enough budget, big plans and fancy UI requirements — building a custom portal for Microsoft 365 Customer Engagement might be your choice. In the end, you will receive something that will match exactly what you want (in case of the professional implementation team of course), but be prepared to wait a little longer and spend a little more.

In the next article, we will discuss the integration of your existing Portal with Dynamics 365.

You can contact us directly with questions about your requirements and situation. Please fill free to get advice on your specific case.

This article originally appeared on UDS blog by Roman Savran.