This blog post is part of a series called AMFTF (a message from the field) containing short blog posts about a best practice, a functionality, a how-to and/or something just worth writing a blog post about. Todays topic is a first look at the “CDS starter portal”.
I must have seen to many sci-fi movies/series in the past because every time when I see/hear the word “portal” I get more excited. The same happened to me when I read in the April ’19 release notes (page 342) of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform that a “CDS starter portal” (Common Data Service starter portal) would be launched.
Last week Microsoft published information about the preview (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/portals/cds-portal) and I just wanted to take it for a spin.
After setting up a trial environment and installing/configuring the right options, I found myself staring at a window with the setting “Portal state: On”. Is it true? Do I have a CDS starter portal? Yes, I did! The screen below was shown when clicking on the “Base Portal URL”.
I clicked on the sample pages and it all seemed to work. The pages contain bogus data of course but still, I had a smile on my face 🙂
Time to sign in. There are two options:
- local SignIn
- External SignIn (Azure AD)
I used the latter and after a consent (Sign in and read user profile), I was redirected to my profile page. When clicking on the pages again, I saw a “Try new editor” button which caught my attention. I clicked on it and was then redirected to a more wysiwyg editor. It looks promising. Some options showed the message: Coming soon. Check back soon for something interesting. The components icon revealed 3 controls, 22 portal components and 41 web templates. Whoeha!
But wait, isn’t it called the “CDS starter portal”. I found some components related to the CDS:
- Entity list
- Entity list filter
- Entity list grid
, but could not get it to work right away. Fortunately it is not that simple straightaway. For now I can say: Yes, the “CDS starter portal” is in preview 🙂