Portals – Nishant Rana's Weblog

Fix – This portal has multiple website bindings, which will cause issues with the portal (Power Pages)

Recently we updated the Site Details like the Site Name and Site URL of a particular Website (Power Platform Admin Center >> Resources >> Dynamics
365
apps, Select the Website and choose Manage)

After which we started getting the below error message –

“Error: This portal has multiple website bindings. which will cause issues with the portal. Delete extra website binding records for this portal in the attached Dynamics 365 Organization.”

This was caused because of multiple active website binding records.

To fix it, open the corresponding Portal Management
app of the corresponding Dataverse / CRM environment.

Navigate to Website >> Website Bindings

Delete or deactivate the extra binding records leaving just one Active record to fix this issue.

Hope this helps..

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How to – Change the base URL of a website (Power Pages)

To change the base URL of a website, navigate to Power Platform Admin Center >> Resources >> Power Pages sites, select the site, and click on Manage.

https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/resources/portals

Select the Edit icon

If the user has only the system administrator role in the corresponding Dataverse environment, we will get the below error.

You must be a Global Administrator or an owner of the Microsoft Entra ID application linked to this website to perform this action

Check the Required role and permissions

Then we tried with the global admin user having all the appropriate roles and permissions and were still getting the below error.

You need to have access mode as read-write and be an owner of the application linked to the portal to perform this action.

The global admin user was the owner of the corresponding application registered for the portal.

To fix it we refreshed the user’s account (we had PIM enabled for the Global Admin role), so maybe refreshing the user or giving it a try after some time helped in resolving the error.

https://nishantrana.me/2022/04/25/how-to-use-refresh-option-to-force-user-state-synchronization-in-power-platform-admin-center-dynamics-365-crm/

Hope it helps..

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Why Your Business Needs Dynamics 365 Map

After a new product launch, companies want their clients/customers to use the product and expect them to share their valuable feedback. Companies often complain that their products do not reach the clients or they do not receive feedback from the client (maybe because their sales rep never made it!).

Well, there can be many reasons for not having the correct data. Be it targeting regions with fewer clients, sales reps never visiting them, or anything else.

How would you improve your product if you do not have the right feedback? If you feel you are unable to track the sales reps’ performance due to a lack of tools, then you must think of integrating your Dynamics CRM with Dynamics 365 Map.

What is Dynamics 365 Map?

Dynamics 365 Map is a plugin that integrates with your Dynamics 365 and displays all the CRM data on the map. It makes data visualization easier. It is developed with the support for Power Apps and integrates well with the CRM.

To have a list of thousands of customers from different regions can be hard to understand. But with a map view, you can easily understand the regions with more sales and the regions that require more marketing campaigns.

This plugin works best for the marketing and sales team. It helps them have correct data to make improved decisions in the future. Also, the data, like appointment duration, appointment notes, etc., which had no proper documentation before, can now be handled well with this map integration.

Reasons Why Your Business Needs Map Integration

There are many more features that make Dynamics 365 map integration a must-have for the marketing and sales department. Let’s go through them one by one:

Route Optimization

Here is the usual process followed by the sales and marketing managers. They hand over the list of client details to the on-field sales representatives. The sales reps visit them one by one and report to their managers at the end of the day.

The sales reps spend more time going from one place to another. But with the map integration, they have optimized routes covering all the locations they want to visit. The map calculates the distance, traffic, and other factors like no toll roads, road closures, etc., to avoid delays in reaching the destination.

The sales rep will save time they spend on roads. They can update their status from the phones when they arrive for meetings and after the meeting is over. Also, the managers would have the current location of the sales reps, so if there are any other clients nearby, the sales rep can meet them. It is a smarter way of optimizing their time and effort.

Map Records

Data visualization matters while planning and deciding future strategies. Having a list of all the data can be more confusing. You might have thousands of details of clients and others. When you are planning a strategy based on product, type of clients, day, or month, it would be hard to find clarity on one particular entity.

But after map integration, you can view all the CRM entities on the map. If you wish to run a marketing campaign in a particular region, you can use filters like region and territory and also draw shapes to find the details you wish from that particular region. All the records from the selected region are plotted on a map.

The managers can plot records and assign the task to their team members. With map visualization, it is easy for the managers to assign tasks. If a particular region has more clients, they can add more sales reps to that region to complete the target.

Proximity Search

Your managers might be visiting a client or are out for some other meetings. What if you can find the locations of other clients nearby their current location? Meeting clients can help in developing a good relationship with your business. It can bring in more sales and turn out fruitful for your organization.

The proximity search feature works best for such scenarios. The proximity search feature shows the clients who are near their current location. So, if the reps are out somewhere and they get free from their meeting earlier than expected, they can use this feature to know the locations of other clients. This way, they can make the best use of their time to improve engagement with the clients.

To have a proximity search, the user needs to add a few filters to fetch only the required information. The result would show concentric circles of different diameters based on your chosen distance. The managers can find the locations that work best for them.

CheckIn/CheckOut

Have you ever called your team member who is busy in a meeting with the client? Do you have to wait the whole day to get feedback about the meetings to make future decisions? Do you feel you are not getting true feedback from the clients because there is a possibility that your sales rep never met them?

For a business trying to get reviews on their new products, having no or compromised responses hinders improvement. If this is the case with you, then you must integrate your CRM with the Dynamics map. Because by doing that, you can track the check-ins and check-outs of your sales rep. The sales rep can only check in when they reach the premises of the given location. They would checkout once the meeting is over and then update the reports/discussion on the app.

Thus, you would have records of how long the meeting lasted, along with the reports. With this feature, none of your sales reps can cancel a meeting without you being notified.

Analytics Dashboard

Improvement comes from analyzing. A business can only grow when they have enough data to analyze what is working and what is not. Especially if you’re sending your sales team on the field, data helps plan the future marketing strategy. The reports from the data of the day, week, month, and year can help you analyze. Based on those reports, make changes that require immediate action and strategies that can be changed with time.

The analytics dashboard in the Dynamics map forms reports and allows you to filter different entities and compare them. Business decisions, sales rep performance, sales reports, and all other things are visible on the dashboard, which helps you plan better.

Multiple Language Support

It’s the fact that users find easy-to-use tools that are in a language you are comfortable with. Understanding tools in the language you have only basic proficiency in might stop you from making their best use.

Dynamics 365 Map supports multiple languages. The user can choose the language of their choice. It would ensure they can use the app with all its features.

Point of Interest

Knowing only the location is not enough when you are going to spend your day at some random location. What if someone wants to set up a meeting in a cafe nearby? Or wants to fill up gas at a gas station.

The sales reps can plan better if they know good cafes and restaurants in the location they are visiting. The sales reps spend their whole day on the field, so they need essentials like food, money, fuel, etc. So, with the Point of Interest feature on the Dynamics Map, the sales reps can find gas stations, cafes, ATMs, medical stores, hospitals, mechanics, etc.

The users do not have to use any other app to find the locations, they can simply search with keywords like cafes, gas stations, ATMs, etc. They would have results on their map along with the locations they are working on.

Security Templates

The chances of a security breach increase if all the employees can see the CRM data. The Dynamics Map has security templates with which you can assign different roles to different employees based on their hierarchy and requirements. So, the employee would be able to see information about the clients they are assigned.

You can also customize the actions for a certain group of users. For example, you can give edit rights to senior managers and view rights to sales representatives.

Conclusion

If you are a pharma company, packaged food/drinks manufacturer, or anyone who has on-field sales reps, Dynamics 365 map integration is what your CRM needs. It helps in better planning of the day for sales reps, and with features like route optimization, your team saves both time and fuel. It helps you visualize the data more easily and decide the strategies for the next marketing campaign. The map gives better ideas to target areas for increasing sales. Licensed companies are offering this integration. They often offer customization on products so you can get them customized per your business requirement. They also help with CRM integration and offer support in initial days and lifetime free updates.

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Getting Started with Dynamics 365 Web Portals

You might know about self-service, considering you are here to read this article. Thanks to that revolutionary feature, we don’t have to take on the traditional approach – calling the customer support agent to cancel or track an order. Not only this, it has become a crucial part considering 88 percent of US respondents want self-service. In comparison, 80 percent of sales are based on engagement, making a platform for collaboration a necessity.

Looking at this, Dynamics launched Dynamics 365 portal to extend the capabilities of businesses further. If you plan to extend your CRM functionalities with Dynamics, this article is for you. Learn all about the Dynamics 365 portal, its types, and how it can help your business before proceeding with the integration.

What is Dynamics 365 Portal

A Dynamics 365 Portal is a way to extend your services beyond websites. It’s a front-end interface that interacts with your Dynamics 365 system and allows access to CRM users and non-CRM users. It provides personalized experiences to your customers, members, and partners. As it’s integrated with the Dynamics 365 system, all the information is directly included in the CRM. You or your portal users don’t have to re-enter the information. Portal allows you to create a wide range of experiences by providing exclusive resources such as sales and marketing information, training and certifications, product and service information, performance management tools, etc. There are various activities that your users can perform with a portal. For example,

Customers can generate tickets for incidents and search the knowledge base for articles.
Partners can view and manage business opportunities.
Employees can focus on trivial tasks by automating the workflow.
You can make calculated decisions by tracking everyone’s performance and planning the strategies accordingly.

Likewise, the information and the features help you create long-lasting relationships, close deals effectively and enhance customer experience. It reduces workload and opens up communication and engagement opportunities.

Why Do You Need a Dynamics Portal?

A portal makes it easy for you to interact with your customers and other stakeholders. As communication and data sharing will be on one platform, it will streamline your business processes. The ability to access the portal from anywhere empowers you to expand your services and run business 24*7. This also strengthens your relationship with the customers and stakeholders. You are able to track everyone’s activities and gain insights into the performances and trends. The information helps you better understand your customers, employees, and partners and provide services tailored to their requirements.

With the help of a portal solution, you will be able to manage your team and customers better. The functionalities portal offers help build loyalty and trust. Instead of handling everything manually, you can expose them to the specific CRM data, empowering them to be accountable with the freedom to accomplish their tasks themselves at their own pace. A good example is the profile section, where users can view all their activities, including transaction details, ticket status, etc. This way, you can understand your users’ requirements and work on them. You can promote open dialogue with community forums and create a set of questions to get constructive feedback.

You can provide exceptional services to customers requiring support, give them access to the knowledge base, and enable them to create their own support tickets. With Dynamics 365 portal, you can add value to your business and customer service.

What are the Capabilities of Dynamics 365 Portal

You can use a portal to allow customers to raise their tickets and track their status themselves or simplify your employees’ tasks by automating workflows. There are various things you can do with a portal, such as:

Self-Service

Your customers, partners, and employees can carry out their activities themselves. Say a customer wants to know the status of their ticket. They can know its status through the portal without asking the customer support executive. Similarly, if the support person requires a customers’ information to solve a particular issue, they can view it from their login area, depending on their role and access rights. This way, you can reduce the help requests volume and smoothen the customer service.

Customer Engagement

You can provide a knowledge base targeted to solve portal user queries. It can also show relevant articles to the users based on the keywords they add to the search box. In FAQs, you can include the answers that customers frequently look for. To further enhance engagement, you can include chat options and analytics features and make your customer interaction more convenient.

This means more visibility, improved conversation, and greater awareness. If people like what you do and the services you offer, they are more likely to recommend you to others.

Partner Relationship

In case you collaborate with your partners, a Dynamics partner portal gives you the ability to offer personalized services to your channel partners. Since everything is in one place and accessible to everyone, it builds transparency and strengthens relationships. It smoothens the conversation by allowing you to share essential data from every stakeholder. It lets you give them a space to cultivate their ideas and opportunities.

Vendor Collaboration

Your vendors can manage their orders, invoices and keep track of quantity, delivery dates, etc., in real-time. This is a much-needed feature for businesses looking to improve their supply chain efficiency. With a vendor-specific portal, you can collaborate with your vendors from one single place. They can create orders and track their status through the portal. You can share quotes, accept/reject order requests, and track invoices.

Ticket Management

One of the primary reasons for having a portal is customer service. This feature allows your customers to raise a ticket whenever they have an issue and track its status via a portal. They don’t have to do customer care and ask them to generate one. Apart from that, the portal offers workflow features such as case deflection that makes users search through the existing cases and see if a ticket with a similar issue already exists. In such cases, customers won’t have to generate a new ticket. They can refer to the existing one and solve their issue.

Community Forums

With Dynamics 365 portal, you can create small forums to enhance customer-to-customer or customer-to-service interaction. The interactions can include discussions about products and services or customer suggestions.

There’s a lot more you can do with the Dynamics portal, depending on the type of portal you choose.

Types of Dynamic 365 Portal

Dynamics 365 Customer Portal

A customer portal helps your customers serve themselves without manual support. You can provide knowledge base articles to help them find relevant answers. You can also enable them to add ratings and reviews and share feedback to improve the overall experience. Live chat, FAQs, how-to guides, video tutorials, user manuals, etc., are other features you can offer.

Employee Portal

With an employee portal, your employees can manage tasks, share knowledge, access resources, and interact with customers and internal teams. They can view FAQs, articles, guides, videos, and more.

HR for Dynamics is an employee portal for HR and managers. Using this portal, your employees can interact with HR regarding leaves, reimbursements, and other details. They can update their bank and other contact details directly from the portal.

For managers, it simplifies their daily tasks. They can access their team’s performance, summary details, leaves, delays, and more in real-time and make timely decisions.

Community Portal

A community portal is a place where people can discuss their problems, share ideas, ask for suggestions, collaborate, write blogs, articles, reviews, etc. This type of portal encourages users to promote your brand. Take the Dynamics Community, for example.

Partner Portal

Partner portal provides your partners easy access to various components, including orders, invoices, and payment history. They can manage their contract details, update information, and collaborate on a single opportunity with other partners. The information provides insights into deals, leads, opportunities, and more. It makes it easy for them to communicate with you and figure out the issues.

Project Service Automation Portal

A Project Service Automation Portal gives your partners a complete view of entities such as assets, agreements, invoices, and orders. You can get this portal with an ERP plan.

Likewise, you can use a Dynamics portal for specific industries like travel, retail, healthcare, finance, and more.

What Features of Dynamics 365 Customer Portals Will Help Your Business?

Wondering whether Dynamics customer portal is right for you or not? Here are a few features Dynamics 365 customer portal can provide you to improve your customer experience.

Easy Configuration and Customization

Apart from the basic layout of Dynamics CRM, you and your customers can customize the portal layout based on your preferences. Besides, the stacked and organized elements make navigation smooth. As for the configuration, it is readily available. You have to deploy it and start using it in a few minutes.

Ticket Management

As a business owner, your primary goal is to fix your customers’ problems. For that, Dynamics 365 customer portal provides a ticketing system. Your customers can raise their own tickets with it, while your employees can interact with them without sending long emails. It’s easy for you to manage documents, cases, schedules, accounts and save time.

Dashboard with BI Integration

The Dynamics portal allows BI integration that will give you all the customer insights on the dashboard.

Knowledge Base

Do you find your customers are waiting for you to share the resources they need at every stage? With Dynamics 365 customer portal, you can offer them a knowledge base full of articles, how-to guides, user manuals, FAQs, documentation, videos, etc. At any point during their journey, they can access the resources.

Document Management with SharePoint Integration

How do you expect your customers to access or share the required information? You’re mistaken if you expect them to download the assets from email updates. A Dynamics portal provides document management where customers and employees can share documents and collaborate on them. SharePoint integration makes it easy to share documents internally with your employees directly from the portal. It helps collaborate seamlessly.

Role-Based Access

Running the business, you know the importance of security. The Dynamics 365 portal ensures that your data is processed and stored securely in one place. Besides, a feature like role-based access limits access to the data. Only authorized users can access the data, and thus there are no data leaks or breaches.

Advantages of Dynamics 365 Portal

The main benefit of the Dynamics 365 customer portal is that it’s easy to start with. Employing it results in better collaboration and engagement with no need to focus on the additional resources. Customers, partners, employees, and every entity, including you, can benefit from the Dynamics portal. You might be thinking about how this is possible. Here are a few ways in which the portal offers your customers better support and a personalized experience:

Builds Loyalty

Through the Dynamics 365 portal, your customers and other stakeholders will access all the information they need 24*7. The timely and accurate responses show that you’re responsive to their needs. This increases their loyalty towards you and gives a better chance of retention. With multiple communication channels, you can eliminate the burden of your customers in reaching out to you and waiting for your response.

Creates Engaging Relationship

With a customer portal, you can build a long-lasting relationship with your customers by connecting with them all the time. You can help them with training, tutorials, and other personalized information. The in-app chat feature ensures that you are available for your customers all the time.

Reduces Margin of Error

Data centralization ensures that the latest version of a document will be available. The accurate data reduces the chances of error and inaccurate documents.

Offer Personalized Services

You can gather the data of your customers’ journey and experiences at every touchpoint and provide services they may prefer. You can recommend products and services they might be interested in.

Provides Incentives and Rewards

You can offer incentives and rewards to show your customers and partners that they are important. A Dynamics 365 customer portal helps you keep track of their activities and reward them for their loyalty. This is how you can tell them that you care about them and their preferences.

Are you ready to improve your customer service?

A Dynamics 365 portal is a tool that will help you optimize your business process. It will give your customers and partners a better understanding of your business and guide them in the right direction. By empowering them with self-service, you can gain a competitive advantage and give them a better experience. So, what are you waiting for? Bring in the Dynamics 365 portal today!

Author Bio

Mr. Maulik Shah is the founder of CRMJetty, a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions, provides ready to CMS integrate portal solutions for various CRM, including Dynamics 365 portal, Dynamics 365 customer portal. Maulik is a tech enthusiast and writes about the various aspects of e-commerce technology.

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Using the Content Access Level for KB Articles in Customer Self-Service Portal

Suppose we have already configured Portal, created contacts and associated KB article to the Portal.

Now the scenario we want to implement is we want a particular user to have access to all the KB article and another user to only specific KB Articles.

For this, we will make use of Content Access Level concept of the portals.

Content access level can be assigned to KB Article and can also be assigned to the Contact Users.

There are 3 content access levels OOB, we can also create our own content access levels.

We have 2 users in our portal, one user we have assigned Default content access level and to another user, we have assigned Premium Users content access level.

Now let us associate content access level to the KB Article.

If we try to edit the KB Article in the Web, we will be presented with the following information

Let us open the Customer Service Hub

The other challenge we will face here is the default and the only form being displayed inside the Customer Service Hub for the KB Article doesn’t include the section or sub-grid for Content Access Level.

To add the Portal Interactive Experience Form, open the Customer Service Hub app in app designer (Settings à My Apps) and add the form, followed by Publish.