The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Platform Enhancement Discussion March 2018

A Dynamics 365 Portal provides an online location for your audience to communicate and collaborate with ease. The core functionality of any Dynamics 365 portal is to allow access to CRM data for non-CRM users from anywhere and at any time. Dynamics 365 portals allow users to access the information they need such as support cases, knowledge base articles, community forums, product guides, and more easily from anywhere on the globe. All they would require is valid login credentials to access the portal which could be obtained from their CRM Administrator.

Instances in which Dynamics 365 Portals can play a huge role for your organization

• When your external users need to create data (like support cases, orders and custom data) in CRM but don’t have access to your CRM.
• When your external users need to view CRM data (like product information, orders, invoices, project status, knowledge base articles, payment history, etc.) but don’t have access to your CRM.
• When your external users want to update data in CRM (like user profile data) but don’t have access to your CRM.

By enabling visitor tracking for Dynamics 365 Portal Pages, you can track details such as page accessed, user name, IP address, date and time, via. web page logs. This information is very much useful for understanding the user’s content preference which will further help in doing targeted campaigns for relevant selling products and services.

Steps to Enable Visitor Tracking for D365 Portal Pages​

1. Login in to CRM.

2. Navigate -> Main Menu -> Portals.

Valarie Silvani has been named among top women influencers in the ERP space by Solutions Review for 2018.  Valarie works with our ERP group managing sales and marketing of financials through different media and channels. She plays a significant role in generating the leads to Accounting and Financial Analysis through web properties and social media platforms. See the listing here: https://solutionsreview.com/enterprise-resource-planning/the-top-women-influencers-in-erp-technology/

It is always important to ensure the optimal performance of your Dynamics 365 Portal. But, sometimes when multiple users are trying to access your website at a particular instant, they may experience the slowness in performance of the site leading to bad experience. In order to avoid such an unwarranted scenario, MTC has come up with few useful tips whose adoption will ensure the optimal performance of your Dynamics 365 Portal. 

Tip#1 Enable Footer and Header Cache

The following site settings are available and are set to “True” by default to support this functionality.

• Header/OutputCache/Enabled: Set the value to “True” to enable output caching for header

Generally, Report to PDF allows to convert any CRM reports to PDF files with the name that is provided in the “File Name” field. But, in order to change the name dynamically with that of field value provided for the CRM entities, MTC has done some customization on Report to PDF solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM.

For assigning and reflecting the field value of an entity on the downloaded PDF file dynamically, you are required to follow the below steps. Please note we have used MS CRM 2011 screenshots for representation purpose in this blog. The below steps holds good for Dynamics 365/CRM too.

Step 1