Portals have come a long way since Adxstudio’s xRM Framework

In case you haven’t heard, the Microsoft October 2019 Release plan has some pretty huge news when it comes to Portals – They are going to be put on center stage as a first-class app type along with Canvas Apps and Model-Driven Apps.

Starting soon, when you go to web.powerapps.com and go to create a new app, in addition to Model-driven apps and Canvas apps there will be a third type of app: Portal!

These Portals will be exactly the same as the previous portals, but you don’t need dynamics CE anymore. These Portals run off of the Common Data Model (just like before, really). In fact, you’ve been able to see the CDS portal in action for a while now. Now, Dynamics CE is still an important vertical to consider, so in a future post we’ll look at when you should skip CE and when you should still include it in your solution.

Portals are going to now be open to a much bigger audience as people jump onboard the power platform. With PowerApps, you can built out purpose-driven applications to suit your business needs – no longer are we modifying a CRM system to implement a system that doesn’t really have anything to do with CRM. Naturally, Portals are a key part of that story and the technology used to build Dynamics portals is being brought forward as the missing part of the puzzle. This feels so rewarding as all the work that my colleagues and I did at Adxstudio back in Regina, Saskatchewan at the old park street office building Portals has really come to full fruition.

Let’s rewind to 2009. I had just completed my Master’s Degree – well, scratch that – I was close to completing my degree and decided to start working full-time while I finished up the last “month or two” of my thesis. Actually finishing and defending my thesis would take well over an additional year, but that’s another story.

You see, I had accepted a fantastic offer for a brand-new developer from a local company in Regina, SK called Adxstudio. I started off right out of the Gate as a Developer on the Product Team working on little product called the xRM framework, which was nearing completion of version 2.2 when I came on board.

Most of Adxstudio’s business came via it’s other product, a Content Management System (which was a big deal at the time) simply called Adxstudio CMS. It was a fine piece of software, but most of our investment was in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which had recently released version 4. We believed that Microsoft Dynamics was the future – and we were all in. What we had developed was a framework which allowed developers to interface easily with Dynamics CRM without interfacing with the SQL database directly. The primary use case for this was to integrate a website withe Dynamics 365, so that records such as contacts from CRM could be surfaced in some way on the website. Sound familiar?

Included was an authentication model that allowed you to log in and have your user associated to a Contact in CRM. It also had a fully functional CMS allowing you to manage the website via Web pages, Web Links, Content Snippets and so on. We developed a few different websites too – we didn’t call them portals yet – such as the Company Website, branded Wireframe Industries – boy I wish screenshots from back then survived – the Conference Website, which used the amazing technology of Silverlight, and Community Website, which added some baked in features such as Blogs, Ideas and Forums.

Well as Dynamics CRM 2011 came out the door, we made the decision to give the xRM framework base code to Microsoft. It became part of the official Microsoft CRM SDK. This was rewarding it it’s own way but put us at an advantage because now the best way to surface data from CRM onto a website was to use a Portal using our framework. You could do some basic stuff for free using Microsoft’s accelerator portals, or starting from scratch using the framework that came with the SDK, but if you really wanted to play with power, you could use our product, which we kept adding features such as Web Forms, and later Entity Forms, Entity Lists, and finally Entity Permissions to. This product was finally named Adxstudio Portals (v4 of the xRM framework).

As Dynamics went through releases over the years so did Portals. With version 5 the solution layering was completely redone from scratch – manually, by me at first (!) – while we refined our ALM processes (and eventually came out with a great toolkit called the ALM toolkit to help automate the process ). With version 6 the front-end was completely redone to use bootstrap and Entity Permissions were added. With Version 7, we added liquid support which radically changed how customization of the Portals was done. It was now ready for the cloud.

And with that, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Portals (and the Adxstudio brand). I had the privilege of working with their new Portal product team to help integrate the Portals into their product lineup. Version 8 of Portals, as we called it internally, would soon be released as Dynamics portals – a fully in-the-cloud solution that extended Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.

Fast forward to today, and finally we are able to do the things with Portals that we saw ourselves doing with it way back in the days were we used “xRM” as a buzzword. I can’t wait to work on many more Portals implementations and I’m interested to see where we go from here.

Thanks for reading.