With PowerApps Portals, Microsoft to make portal creation easier with Common Data Service

Source: Microsoft

Microsoft announced PowerApps Portals earlier this week, a platform for building internal and external-facing web sites using data from the Common Data Service, including Dynamics 365 apps.

Microsoft program managers Dileep Singh and Sandeep Dhanrajani explained at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2019 that PowerApps Portals is the platform on which Dynamics 365 Portal already works. The new offering, enabled thanks to the fact that the D365 Portal product has been architecturally separated from its legacy dependencies on the first party Customer Experience apps, now runs purely against the Common Data Service.

The new approach to portals comes at an important time as Microsoft is seeing triple digit growth in portal usage. They shared some metrics around portals from the last six months including:

• 13,000 monthly active portals, up 33 percent in the last six months
• 8.03 million monthly active users in the last month, up 180 percent in the last six months
• 200 million page views per month – excluding bot traffic – which is 106 percent growth
• 52 million monthly transactions, up 110 percent--this includes all CDS operations as well as log in and log out

Portals will become the third type of PowerApps, explained Singh, alongside canvas apps and model-driven apps.