Is power app portals the right choice?

[LeeJBS]

Hi All. 

Just looking for a bit of advice. I need to build out a complex form with lots of dependencies on other fields answers. The purpose of the form is to share with our customers like an onboarding form that the responses will then be used as a "configuration" for some of of our vendors. Some of our vendors have some spreadsheets\questionnaires that need to be filled before they will start the build of their products for our customers. 

So essentially from your experiences for complex forms would Powerapps Portals be the way to go? or would another complex form system be better. I have tried out Microsoft forms but I don't think its the right fit. Any recommendations would be awesome. 

Thanks in advance

[OliverRodrigues]

Hi

one thing to bear in mind is that Power Apps Portals (currently) doesn't provide a business logic rule to hide/shown your questions based on dependencies

those would have to be developed via JavaScript

in my opinion, Power Apps Portals are great if you are already using D365 to drive your business processes and you want to expose D365 data externally or collect data via a web form kind of thing

there is a learning curve as any other platform, but the platform is very extensible and there are loads you can do with it

to have an idea of what people are doing with the Portals you can google the following:

inurl:powerappsportals.com

inurl:microsoftcrmportals.com

I hope this answer helps your decision

[LeeJBS]

Thanks heaps for that. At this stage the business isn’t invested much in D365. I guess I’ll look at another platform for it then. 

thanks for the insights. 

[chleverenz]

Hi @LeeJBS ,

i agree with @OliverRodrigues that one of the primary focuses of portals was/is to expose dynamics data and that is still a good fit.

Nevertheless, Microsoft takes a new path with power app portals that you provision a so called cds environment, which is in no means a crm environment. You just have a backend for the website you run.

This backend is much more than a database. It is part of a large ecosystem and you can leverage all possibilities of power automate and backend integrations to many other services. And when it comes to designing entities (what is comparable to creating database tables) you have a very nice interface of doing so.

As you have to write the businesslogic also with another approach, you could still think about using portals as a website.

But when you find a service, where you already can setup that kind of ruling stuff, its definetely preferrable.

So, no advice but keep in mind: PowerAppPortals already brings a full infrastructure for running a website and the programmingstack will be javascript and liquid templating and may be some plugins/workflows/power automates to deal with your data.

Hope this does not confuse too much,

  Christian

PS no, i am not employed at microsoft 🙂

PPS i work with portals since it was adx and i am coming from a programming background. Yes, our customers come from a crm background but when it comes to external integration of data, power app portals is not a bad choice for doing so. We also have customers, who use a mix of power apps and power app portals with the same cds environment (without crm). If you need that kind of scenarios, i would give cds driven stuff a try 🙂

[Michaelogunsola]

Hi

As OliverRodrigues stated, power apps portal works by getting from the dynamics CRM environment it is connected to. The data displayed by the portal is sitting in the CRM environment. However, the portal has a webform feature whereby you can create different tabs or steps on the form. This works by setting up a web form with different steps and tabs based on your dependencies and requirements. You can build this webform to advance from the starting form and on completion of the first form, the user can advance to the next tab and so on, while the form data is being collated in the CRM environment.

This might require some custom actions as well including customizing the page or form with a custom JavaScript code as required for your business need.

I have included this documentation, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/configure/load-form-step on how the load form and load tab step works for more information.

Hope this provides more information on what you are trying to achieve. And if this information was useful, kindly mark this as correct response.

Regards,

Michael Ogunsola

CRM Support Engineer