Managing Forum in Community Portals in Dynamics 365 – Part 1.

Suppose we have setup portals in Dynamics 365 and have used Community Portal template.

Community portal allows us to create Forums that lets the users discuss various topics.

• To create a new Forum, log in to CRM, go to Community – Forums.

• Click on New to create a new Forum.

The important properties here are

• WebSite – Community Portal. (the web site inside which we want to create the forum)
• Parent Page – Page where we want the forum to appear. Forums in our case.
• Partial URL – URL for the page.
• Forum and Thread Page Template – Specify the existing template for them.
• Display Order – Defines the order at which it should appear.

Creating the new forum record in published state (Publishing State) adds the Forum to the forum page in the portal.

Forum will have an associated thread (s), which can be created by the Portal user in the portal or can be created by Admin user within CRM.

Test Forum with the associated thread :-

Inside CRM we’d see the thread associated to the forum.

Thread will have associated Post(s) to it. Post are auto created when a thread is created in the portal.

Suppose we are creating a new thread with the below details in our test forum from within the portal.

This will create a post associated to the thread.

In next blog post we’d explore other features of the community portal.

Hope it helps.