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: