Using Power Pages as an Intranet

[Gary_Eden]

Hi
I'm looking into using Power Pages as a halfway point between PowerApps and SharePoint, in essence creating an Intranet site that can leverage data held in Dataverse (managed by a suite of PowerApps).

Other posts have suggested that using Power Pages in this way is likely to be the way forward, in part due to the ease of construction and reduced time to live. There are suggestions that Power Pages may start taking ground away from SharePoint.

I don't need users to Authenticate (login) to see the information but I do need to restrict access so only users from our company can access the information.

If I keep the site Private I can provide access to named individuals (there doesn't appear to be the option to use groups). But if I don't need them to authenticate how will the site know who they are? Also, how does this affect licencing?

If I set the site to Public then anyone with the link can view the site. I've followed the recommendations about configuring the HTTP settings so search engines etc. won't find the site. However, how can we configure the site so that it will only accept visitors who come from a specific starting point (as you can with traditional websites). I've been reading through the documentation on the Web Access Firewall (WAF) and was hoping there would be something in that but I didn't find anything (I haven't enabled the WAF yet so there may be more to come).

The eventual aim is to include the Power Pages within a Teams channel, much the same way that you can with PowerApps. This will then enable users to interact with content with the site in Teams and/or a browser (either direct URL or by opening from Teams).

I suspect that keeping the site private will be the way to go but having to provide access to individuals one-by-one will be a pain. Especially as we already have Security Groups and Office 365 groups with everybody in already. And that still leaves the question of licencing.

Thanks in advance.

[Gary_Eden · Accepted solution]

Further to my original post the information here seems to fit the requirements. Although it seems a little strange to have to turn off the WAF and CDN before you can use it. 

If I'm understanding it correctly, the site will be set to public (so I don't need to add users individually) and then by using the Restrict by IP address locks it down to a whitelist of starting point URLs.

The only question then is around licencing. 

If the site is now public (restricted by IP address) and users are not required to authenticate, then the Anonymous users licence will be sufficient - correct?

[tuxmc]

Hey mate, I have the same question. Did you get to the bottom of this? 

Cheers

MC

[Gary_Eden]

Hi @tuxmc 

Our IT licencing guys had a conversation with our Microsoft contact and having the site public restricted by white listed IP address seems to tick the boxes and we can use anonymous licencing. 

This addresses our need to be able to provide general internal information without exposing it to the general public. We have also added a security further layer, to access the white listed IP address users have to be logged on to our LAN.

This project has been paused for the moment, as I needed to work on other projects. 

However, the plan is to have sensitive/restricted information saved within a subarea of the site, requiring users to authenticate to access the information (you can have both types of licencing on the same site).

An interim step focuses on the user experience and filtering information by the relevant department, we have all this information in Dataverse. Using authentication is a bit excessive for this purpose but you can extend Power Pages with JavaScript and set cookies etc. My plan was to have users use a simple login page to set a cookie (using JavaScript) and then use this to filter relevant information and potentially use this to save local favourites etc. - in the same way I used to do when building websites.

I was just brushing up on my JavaScript when I had to divert to the other project but hope to return to this one later this year. I did find another post explaining how to set cookies for Power Pages using JavaScript, in theory it should be straight forward - but won't know until I try.

Hope this helps. 

[tuxmc]

@Gary_Eden Thank you heaps for your time and help, super useful. 

Cheers

MC