Customer Portal Accelerator

Customer Portal Accelerator

Microsoft recently released a major new version of their eService/Event/Partner portals and called it the Customer Portal Accelerator:

http://customerportal.codeplex.com/

It's a stripped down version of the 

adxstudio portal and 

includes more capabilities than before, including:

• Content Management
• Windows Azure support (host portal in the cloud)
• Improved User Interface
• Designed for xRM (Pages, Content, Links, Security etc stored in CRM)
• Windows Live authentication

Tips and Tricks

The following should help you get the Customer Portal Accelerator working on the Microsoft VPC

Website Copy

Step 6 highlights the use of an xRM tool to copy the “website” definition into the custom entities in CRM. I found the following command worked for the Microsoft VPC:

WebSiteCopy.exe /targetConnectionString:"Authentication Type=Integrated; Server=http://crm-srv-01/PSO" /sourceFile:"customerportal.xml" /targetWebsiteName:"Customer Portal"

Make sure you check your OrgName in the URL. Also, if you make a change to the targetWebsiteName value, then you need to update this in the web.config file!

Rebuild Website

Steps 13-15 help you to recompile the website to work with your CRM environment. 

Change the “crm-site” key to reflect the Portal name you supplied in the website copy:

Modify the CRM authentication details:

Setup Portal Website

Step 16 does not include any useful information for setting up the final Portal website. Make sure you do the following:

• Create a Website in IIS (not a virtual directory)
• Make sure that “Anonymous Access” is the only authentication method
• Create a host header so that you can configure Live Id authentication:

You will also need to add a line to your C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS file:

127.0.0.1 cpa..com

• Modify the ASP.NET version to 2.0
• Ensure that 404 errors redirect to the default.aspx page. The new portal will pull the page URL’s from CRM:

CRM 5 - Latest News

Announcing CTP-4


"The Dynamics CRM development team has been working hard over the last few months to complete the final coding phase for CRM ‘5’ and incorporate the great feedback we’ve been getting from everyone participating in our pre-release programs.   We recently reached ‘code complete’ on our last few planned features, which means for the rest of the project, it’s all about driving all of the new CRM ‘5’ features to release quality."

"There are a significant number of new features and enhancements that we’ve delivered in this last coding phase – it’s a significant change from CTP-3 and we’re excited about them!  At the same time, we’ve heard from many of you that you’re excited about them too and would really benefit from seeing them prior to the Beta release later in the summer."

"Well – we’ve listened.  I’m excited to announce that at the beginning of July we will be making a special ‘CTP-4’ build available to all of our pre-release programs.  This is an interim release intended to provide you with an early preview of the amazing array of features coming in Beta.  As an interim build that will only be available for two months, we will only be making CTP-4 available as a download for on-premises deployment and evaluation.   This means that the v5 deployments for CRM Online will continue to run CTP-3 until they are upgraded for Beta. "

Forrester Wave: CRM Suites Q2 2010

The latest Forrester Wave: CRM Suites for Midsize and Large Organisations are 'available' on the Microsoft website.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/default.mspx

Here are the charts: