A Brief History of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portal: Where We've Been, and Where We're Going

Microsoft announced the acquisition of Adxstudio in September of 2015 so that it could include its web portal offering as a native part of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 portfolio. Microsoft knew that allowing organizations to engage with their customers online was as important as ever, and that web self-service was quickly becoming one of the most popular channels to do that. Competitors like Salesforce already had solutions as part of their product, and it was time that Microsoft didn’t rely solely on partners to fill the gap.

With the three-year anniversary of the release of the Portal offering coming up, it seems like an appropriate time to look at history of the product, why more and more organizations are using its capabilities, and what the future holds as it finds its place in the Power Platform.

Adxstudio – A Brief History

Adxstudio was a Canadian-based partner with roots in the content-management space through their Adxstudio CMS product, which was built in ASP.NET on top of SQL Server. They identified the opportunity to build a similar product using Dynamics CRM, and so Adxstudio Portals was born.

Even before the full acquisition, Microsoft and Adxstudio had partnered together to release the freebie version of Portal (known as the Portal Accelerators), as well as the LINQ-to-CRM provider that was originally developed by Adxstudio. The announcement in 2015 meant Microsoft was acquiring the entire product (not the services side of the business, however, which was spun off into a company called Adoxio, which has since been acquired by KPMG).

The Portal Product Before and During the Acquisition

What was so attractive to Microsoft about the Adxstudio offering?  There were certainly (and still are) other web portal technologies for Dynamics 365, and there were probably a number of factors that were taken into account during Microsoft’s decision-making process. However, one thing that was always considered a strength of the product is that it was built directly into Dynamics 365, with no dependency on a third-party CMS platform.