The best part about Dynamics 365 is that you can now launch portals related to customer, support or the prospect. Now, 100 per cent of these things including maintenance and integration can be controlled using Dynamics 365. The Dynamics 365 portal allows the audience to collaborate and communicate via an online location.  It also permits people to get the necessary support pertaining to issues, how-to guides, and search knowledge guides to name a few. Now, the information that the audience is going to get depends on the category they belong to such as customers, internal team members or the business partners to name a few categories, Thus people can learn a lot about the products and services that are available. You do not need any additional software, hardware, licenses or certificates to make this work.  If you already have a subscription for Dynamics 365 Enterprise, you have access to at least Dynamics 365 portal. Using it, you can differentiate yourself from others or more specifically your competitors.  Do I Need a Dynamics 365 Portal If I Have a Website If you already have a website, that’s wonderful, Dynamics 365 portal is not going to supplant it anyways. Just in case, if you are thinking that it is going to replace it. No doubt, your company’s website is a lead generating machine. But, it helps you in extending your web presence from a homepage and a few service pages to a territory that allows people to engage and communicate actively. Here are the benefits that you are going to enjoy when you properly leverage a portal which comes with pre-packaged templates. Customer Engagement Customers that are going to engage are going to become repeat customers. Those who become repeat customers are the ones who will soon turn to advocates to spread the good news about your products and services. For example, a community portal will encourage prospects and customers to share and discuss your products online. Plan to field questions on these portals so that people can stay engaged.  Encourage questions related to your product on this portal and respond to these questions publicly so that people can trust your brand. Apart from these things, you can host blogs on it so that people visiting the portal can enhance their knowledge about the products that you offer.  Customer Self Help Customer Self Help portals are very beneficial to you if you are already using a CRM. it provides the necessary support to your clients so that your frontline can relax a bit. Before the customer submits his case to you, he can give all the details pertaining to the product that they did buy. On top of it, knowledge-based articles will help the customers to solve most of the minor problems without even registering their complaint. Now, this is the best way to reduce the number of cases from being reported.  Engage Your Partners In case, you want to quickly scale up your business, you need partners such as reseller, distributor, and supplier to assist you with this task. Using the Partner Portal, you can trace the sales channel data. It is just like how you would get information from your sales staff. You can also use it to empower your partners and make quick and better decisions to move your business.  Employee Engagement The employee portal will work similarly to the intranet that you use to connect your staff with others. You can permit them access to certain CRM features that are at for specific groups. In a similar manner of how customer service portal can be used to tackle issues related to customers, this portal can focus on raising tickets and solving issues that customers are facing.  Framework for Custom Portal  If you are one that thinks out of the box, this framework is quite beneficial. You can customize the portal as per your vision and plan. For example, if you are planning to use it to manage a franchise, you can create one for franchise portal. Or you can use it to manage other things such as independent agents, professional relationships, investments and so forth.

Sometimes we may get scenario wherein we have to make API calls to an entity from dynamics 365 Portals, so here is my blog that will guide you step by step to how to achieve the same. In CRM navigate to dynamics 365 Portals as shown below. Click on entity list as shown below Click on new as shown below. Enter name in the name field. Select the entity to which you have to make API request. Select website. Click on add view and select view. Click on save and save the record. Now click on OData Tab Select Enabled. Select Enabled. Now Select view (Note: Only the fields in the view will be exposed to the API). To access API use https://domain/_odata/GetAccountsData By accession above URL in browser you will be able to reterive data from Account entity.