Dynamics Portals have been used in government and Fortune 100, 500 for years and years. The problem was, that they were difficult to deploy and customize.
Power Apps Portals was Microsoft’s first attempt at making the D365 Portals easier to use. The big addition was the new designer. Power Pages is attempt two. With Power Pages, another new designer, Microsoft is essentially democratizing portals by making the same capabilities the Fortune 100 have available to the end user.
The portal below is a Power Apps Portal (Dataverse). It’s the patient portal for Cloud for Healthcare. The chat window is the Azure Health Bot and D365 Omnichannel Services. The bot can route triage based on skills and workflows setup in Omnichannel.
The capabilities of Cloud for Healthcare that is layered on D365, are in turn layered on Dataverse, which uses the CDM for data schema. We use “solution layering” and “extending the schema” to describe the architecture. The Common Data Model (enterprise and industry schemas) can be extended for industry cloud.
These common schemas, and rich functionality of Dataverse, especially its capability to extend data to Power Platform, M365 and Azure give Microsoft a technical advantage over SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce. It is a large part of what makes MS Cloud enterprise capable.