What are Power Apps portals?
Power Apps makers can now create a powerful new type of experience: external-facing websites that allow users outside their organizations to sign in with a wide variety of identities, create and view data in Microsoft Data verse, or even browse content anonymously.
The full capabilities of Dynamics 365 Portals, previously offered only as an add-on to customer engagement apps (Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation), are now available standalone in Power Apps.
These capabilities feature a revamped end-to-end experience for makers to quickly create a website and customize it with pages, layout, and content. Makers can reuse page designs through templates, add forms and views to display key data from Data verse, and publish to users.
Power Apps portals lifecycle portal is always created as a trial. A trial portal, which expires after 30 days, is useful for trying out its capabilities at no cost. After it expires, the portal is suspended and shut down. Seven days after it's suspended, the trial portal is deleted.
You'll be notified at every stage of the portal lifecycle—nearing suspension, suspended, deleted, and converted from trial to production—through toast notifications and email.
As an administrator, you can convert a trial or suspended portal to a production portal. When converting a portal from trial to production, you must ensure that the environment is also a production environment.
You can't convert a trial portal to a production portal in a trial environment. If you delete the environment in which a trial portal is created, the portal is also deleted.
The first portal is free to be created in an environment in a tenant. If you need to create more than one portal, you must have 1 GB of unused storage space in the tenant.
Understanding portal lifecycle stages
The following diagram explains various stages that a Power Apps portal goes through, from creation until deletion.
Trial portal
Every portal begins as a trial portal that expires after 30 days. You can convert it to a production portal from the Power Apps Portals admin centre if you have the required licenses. More information: Convert a portal from trial to production
To convert a trial portal to a production portal, the environment should have required add-ons for external users or a license for internal users.
Suspended portal
You'll continue to see notifications in the Power Apps portals admin centre about the expiration of your trial portal. Trial portals expire after 30 days. If you don't convert your portal to production within the trial period, the portal is shut down and placed in suspended status.
You can't access your portal after it expires. However, you can still convert the suspended portal to production within seven days of suspension.
Deleted portal
If you don't convert your portal to production within the seven-day suspension period, the portal is deleted. The portal data isn't deleted from the environment, but the space used by the portal in the environment will be released, and you can create a new portal.
Portal connectivity to a Microsoft Dataverse environment
A portal connects to a Dataverse environment using an Azure Active Directory application. The application is created in the same tenant where the portal is provisioned. The application is registered with the Dataverse environment during the portal provisioning process.
Each portal has a separate Azure Active Directory application associated with it, whether it's connected to the same Dataverse environment or not. The default Azure Active Directory authentication provider created for a portal uses the same Azure Active Directory application to authenticate the portal. Authorization is enforced by web roles assigned to the user accessing the portal.
You can see the associated portal application in Azure Active Directory. The name of this application will be Portals- with the GUID of the web site record. For example, Portals-907807dd-951d-4deb-a9cf-28d76bed06a0
The portal ID is in the App ID URI field in the Azure Active Directory application. The person who provisions the portal owns this application. Don't delete or modify this application, or you might break the portal functionality. You must be the application owner to manage a portal from the Power Apps Portals admin Centre.
For a portal to connect to Dataverse using an Azure Active Directory application, it requires an authentication key connected to the Azure Active Directory application. This key is generated when you provision a portal, and the public part of this key is automatically uploaded to the Azure Active Directory application.
Server-side cache in portals
As a portal administrator, you can clear the server-side cache for the entire portal so that updated data from Microsoft Dataverse is immediately reflected on the portal. Updates from Dataverse are communicated to the portal in asynchronous mode, so there might be a lag between the time data is updated in Dataverse and the time that updated data appears on the portal. To eliminate this delay—for example, when it interferes with portal configuration—you can force the portal to refresh its cache immediately.
