Delegated administration of portal users

[MagnusGöransson]

Hey experts,

Is there any guidance on how to delegate administration of portal users? I get alot of questions around this and what many orgs want is to delegate the administration of the end users to the organization where the end users resides. Here is a example:

Contoso Inc is a company that runs trucks for different manufacturing companies. They have like 100 client companies.

They use a PowerApp Portal so that each client company can login and get the numbers thay want. Metrics like how often a transport is on time or other performance measures. Maybe they also book transports through the portal.

Contoso would like to designate one administrator from each client company that can authorize all the individuals from each client company so that they can get access to the portal. How can that be achieved?

[Yogesh_Gupta]

@MagnusGöransson This is a common scenario and one of the USP of portals as well. The external users who login are essentially contact in CDS database. Portals has it's own security model of it's own. Through portals you can create webroles for appropriate contacts:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/configure/create-web-roles

Then you can provide entity permissions:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/configure/assign-entity-permissions

You can also define more granular permissions:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/configure/webpage-access-control

Regards,

Yogesh

[Ashish2012]

3 Steps: 
Assign a Web Role

Provide Entity permissions

Then, Web Page Access permissions

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/configure

[nhayduk · Accepted solution]

Hi Magnus,

I'd recommend looking at the Partner Portal template (for Dynamics 365), as it has this functionality.  If you don't plan on using it to start from, spin it up in a trial and check it out.

As others have mentioned, Portal users are just contacts.  So it is possible to allow users to create contacts, and then run workflows on those contact that can do things like invite them to the Portal, or assign them certain roles/permissions.  This can be done using Entity Lists and Entity Forms (as demonstrated in the Partner Portal).

Hope that helps.

Nick