Power Apps: basic setup of your Portal

Why?

Since I have done multiple event speaker sessions on the topic of Power Apps Portals, I really should blog about it more 😁

What?

This will be the first in a serie of blog posts. It will focus on how a Power Apps Portal can be setup and on which topics to have special attention. I will use screenshots from my Demo Portal:

How?

When I heard the first rumors of Power Apps Portals as a special type of Power Apps, I was mindblown 🤯. After years of SharePoint consultancy (where the Extranet functionalities never really laid the foundation needed for a real Customer Portal or Partner Portal), my expectations of Portals within the Power Platform were really high… imagine the letdown when Dynamics Consultants told me that it was basically the same as the Dynamics Portals that have been around for quite some time! Nevertheless I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt and the more I discover the more I like it!

So I will skip the basic introduction on what a Power Apps Portal is, because Microsoft has done it pretty good in their introduction: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-powerapps-portals-powerful-low-code-websites-for-external-users/

I even will skip the actual creation of a Power Apps Portal explained here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/create-portal

This post will focus on a few basic pointers:

1) Provision the Power Apps Portal way before you want to start working on it. It can take quite some time before Microsoft has provisioned everything. Opening up the Portal, the accompanying Model Driven App or other settings can result in errors. Example is when I tried to open the Model Driven App of the Power Apps Portal for the first time it gave me a very strange error of “Invalid App Site Map“:

2) First check on the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get Designer (WYSIWYG) and then move on to the Model Driven App. This Portal Management App is provisioned automatically (often called something like Portal Management) and is your looking pane / back end configurator for the Portal.

TIP: create New pages in the WYSIWYG Designer and then see the page appear in the Model Driven App in the Web Pages Entity of the Content Section 💡.

3) In the tab of a browser it will show the name of your page by default with the name of the page followed by the name of the portal: something like Home – Starter Portal. Changing the settings of the Websites entity, does not do anything with regards to web browser tab names.

To change this you need to go to the Portal Management App and look for the Content Snippets entity. Within the records of this entity you will find the record with the Name: Browser Title Suffix:

Change the Value to whatever you want it to be:

4) Not all changes in the Portal Management App are immediately visible because of (Azure) caching. Some caching is pretty persistent so here are the options to make sure your change will be visible:

1. there is the Clear Cache button that an Admin will see when visiting the Portals About page: just add /_services/about to the root URL of the Portal and basic info will appear including a Tools section with the Clear Cache button.
   

   

   See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/admin/clear-server-side-cache for more documentation and explanation.
2. there is the Power Apps Portals admin center where the section of Portal Actions gives you the option to Restart the Portal.
   

   

   This “hidden” Admin Center can be found by selecting the Portal Power App as done in opening the WYSIWYG Designer but instead of selecting the Edit button select the Settings button and then click on the Administration link of the overlay popup.
3. in the same place as option 2 there is a Portal Details section where you can change the Portal State from On to Off and vice versa.
   

   

Be sure to stay tuned on this series on Power Apps Portals! ⏳