Tag: Adxstudio Portals

Using Entity List to show CRM Data in Portal in Dynamics 365


Let us take a simple example of showing Contact entity views in the Portal. Entity List can be used to show existing CRM View to the portal.

Go to Portal – Entity List and create a new entity list record. Select contact for Entity Name and Active Contacts and Inactive Contacts as the views to be displayed in the portal. (leave all other value as default).

After saving the record go to Web Pages tab to specify the web page where the page should be displayed.

Before this let us quickly create Web Page in the portal. We can also create the page in CRM as well.

CRM – Portal – Web Pages –

From Portal – Log in to Portal with Admin rights and click on New – Child Page to create a new Page

Add the page to the primary navigation

Associate the Contact Page to the Entity List record inside CRM

Open the Contact page in the Portal.

Hope it helps.

Associating Knowledge Base article with Portal in Dynamics 365.


Suppose we have setup the Community Portal and we want to configure Knowledge Base articles with the Portal.

For this, we need to go to Settings à Service Management à Embedded Knowledge Search

Specify the Portal URL and other settings

Once the setup is done, go to Support page in the portal and perform a search

Clicking on the search result opens up the article in the portal.

Hope it helps..

Managing Idea Forums in Community Portal in Dynamics 365


This post assumes that we have already set up the Community Portal.

To create a new Idea Forum, go to CRM – Community – Idea Forums

Create a new idea forum record.

Type of Voting can be one of the following Up, Up or Down, Rating.

Saving the record, adds the new Idea Forum in the Portal.

We can add idea to the Idea forum it can be done either through CRM or from the Portal

Idea within Portal: –

For Managing Idea Forum from the Portal, create a new Web Role and add that role to the Moderator Roles and assign the same web role to the Contact (Portal User) in CRM.

  • Below is our custom web role

  • Add the role to Moderator Roles in the Idea Forum record.

  • Open the contact record and assign this new web role.

“There is currently no front-side moderation functionality built into the idea portal application.”

Hope it helps..

Managing Blogs in Community Portal in Dynamics 365


Let us see the steps that we need to follow to create \ manage blogs.

To create a new Blog, go to CRM – Portals – Blogs

Create a new blog (specify the corresponding existing templates for Home, Page and Archive)

Saving the record, adds the new blog in the Portal.

We can add blog posts to the blog created.

Blog post within Portal: –

For Managing Blog Posts from the Portal, open the blog record in CRM and go to Author Roles

Create a new Web Role and add that role to the Author Roles and assign the same web role to the Contact (Portal User) in CRM.

  • Below is our custom web role

  • Add the role to Author Roles

  • Open the contact record and assign this new web role.

  • Login to the portal and open the test blog. The portal user will have the rights to edit, delete, new etc.

Hope it helps..

Managing Forum in Community Portals in Dynamics 365 (Using Forum Access Permissions) – Part 2


Suppose we have following 3 forums in our Community Portal

  • And we want a particular portal user to have rights to manage a specific forum, say for e.g. test forum in our case.
  • For this let us create a new web role, here we have specified the Community Portal as the WebSite.

  • Navigate to Community – Forum Access Permissions

  • Create a new permission for the Test Forum and assign the newly created Web Role.

    (Specify Forum as Test Forum and Right as Grant Change)

  • Open the contact record (portal user) in CRM and assign the new web role.

  • Login to the community portal.
  • On opening the General Discussion forum, the user doesn’t have any edit rights.

  • On opening the Test Forum, the user has the modify rights

Hope it helps.

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.