Power Apps Portals

Connect and share data with your organization’s key external stakeholders, safely and easily.

Overview

Power Apps Portals is part of the Microsoft Power Platform. These easy-to-build and use websites allow businesses the opportunity to create low-code, personalized websites for a variety of users (both internal and external). Through Power Apps Portals, an organization can select a variety of priority users to access and view pre-determined Dynamics 365 data.

Through these intuitive touchpoints, organizations can strengthen key business relationships and share data faster.

Contact our team to learn more about how our team can unlock the full power of Power Apps Portals for your business.

Strategy

Adept Dynamics extends our clients’ Dataverse interactions to external and internal audiences, including their customers, partners, and employees. We are uniquely positioned to help our clients build low-cost portals that allow safe and seamless access to predetermined parties, like a valued partner organization.

Capabilities
Features

Engage with external customers and partners: Give both internal and external users secure access to your data either anonymously or through commercial authentication providers like LinkedIn, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, or enterprise providers such as Azure Active Directory B2C (Azure AD B2C).  

Custom parameters for users: Set authentication requirements, customize data for each user, and allow users to submit their information privately with straightforward admin controls.

Bring all your data together: Bring data from the apps you use—including Power BI and Power Automate—together with Microsoft Dataverse and enable your users to interact with it anytime, anywhere. Enrich portals with model-driven forms, views, lists, charts, and dashboards to offer more value with each interaction.

Strategic Planning
Stakeholder Incorporation
User Training
System Adoption
System Support
Optimizations

Custom Strategy

Technology Assessment: We begin by evaluating and taking stock of a client’s current CRM system (if one exists) to better understand how its teams are using and sharing data in their daily workflows. We evaluate current-state technology using our thorough assessment model that accounts for all relevant factors (integrations, data-usage practices across departments, authenticated users, etc.).

Organization Insights Gathering: We then pair insights gained from the technology assessment with a business oriented fact-finding phase where we interface with predetermined company decision-makers in structured deep-dive Q&A sessions. These organizational deep-dives grant us with unique perspectives to better understand company processes, objectives, challenges, and optimal CRM end-states.

Recommended Approach: Once armed with the critical insights and perspectives gained from the first two phases , we create a go-forward strategy with the goal of meeting all project objectives at the highest levels possible and in the established timeframe. All Adept Dynamics projects incorporate industry best practices throughout.

Stakeholder Incorporation Benefits

Company leaders with authority and clout become project advocates. System “experts” are established at critical junctions of the organization – helping to accelerate user-adoption​. Ensures that system design and functions are compatible with leadership’s expectations and assumptions​. Decentralizes project advocacy and expertise​.

Finding The Right Leaders

To ensure the highest possible levels of user-trust, adoption, and fluency for any Dynamics 365 system, Adept Dynamics recommends incorporating our proven stakeholder incorporation model.

Our stakeholder strategy consists of working closely with our clients to determine leaders throughout their organization; ideally at both executive and manager levels and representative of the teams that will use the system most. Once stakeholders are determined, these individuals will be brought forward on a planned based into certain decision making, milestone review meetings, and other planning sessions. The stakeholder group essentially becomes de-facto project advocates and project representatives to the rest of the organization–further establishing system trust.

Additionally, the project stakeholder team is heavily involved in later-stage User Acceptance Training and Train-the-Trainer efforts.

Guiding Leadership Through Advanced Sessions

Function-Specific Webinar Trainings: To ensure that a system’s core users are prepared and proficient for system usage in daily workflows, Adept Dynamics plans and conducts training webinars that focus on a variety of predetermined/custom topics. Training sessions begin before a system is launched/optimized and continue after initial project completion. Most training sessions focus on general topics that are relevant to a wide variety of system users. If a training session is focused on teaching a niche feature, we work with stakeholders from the relevant department/team to tailor the content accordingly.

Client-Led Training Sessions (Train-the-Trainer): In our team’s experience, hands-on training resonates most when taught in hands-on/group breakaway formats –with custom curriculum tailored to departmental requirements. Adept Dynamics works with our clients to prepare project stakeholders to teach their peers a blend of department-specific material and general capability topics.

By relying on the proven train-the-trainer model, we help to incentivize that client stakeholders learn system functions early and with high competence (further establishing them as system experts/advocates) and make group trainings more immediate and and fun (as system users are learning from their peers).

Endorsement of System Change

For any CRM to achieve widespread adoption and trust with its core users, a transparent and well-crafted communications program is paramount.

Adept Dynamics specializes in conceptualizing and executing internal (employee-targeted) communications programs that effectively message the purpose, benefits, and expected outcomes of Dynamics 365 systems work. Messages are tailored to account for both company-wide and individual audiences.

Closely partnering with our client leads, we create comprehensive communications plans and materials that account for a project’s entire lifecycle. Our strategic communications team creates all necessary program materials: talking points, executive communications, visual aids, sneak peak videos, and more. Additionally, we are experienced in organizing and executing complex all-company events specifically focused on preparing employee bases for Dynamics 365 through explainer presentations and systems training.

Program spokespeople are most often the predetermined project stakeholders.

User Training

Proactively avoid issues and train users on evolving system functionality and features

Function-Specific Training Sessions:: Scheduled training sessions (usually webinars) led by Adept Dynamics team members demonstrating use of the system in support of specific functions. Training sessions provide an environment for demonstration and hands-on learning to gradually grow employee familiarity with the system post-launch.

User Documentation:: Adept Dynamics creates a digital “how to” guide for common user tasks, actions, or processes to supplement user training. Guides contain a mix of video content, system scree shots, and diagrams.

System Trust and Adoption

Build excitement and trust in Dynamics 365 with the system’s core-users​. Clearly communicate how and why the system will help employees do their work at the highest possible levels​. Demonstrate how a well-crafted Dynamics system will make the company healthier and more profitable​.

Reactive Support

Provides client with timely technical support in response to unforeseen issues and to receive new feature suggestions

Ticket Submission System: Adept Dynamics will create a dedicated support portal that allows authenticated system users to draft and submit technical support request tickets –tickets will then be reviewed, triaged, and executed through a real time review process overseen by Adept Dynamics. Tickets can either be submitted as bug fixes or new feature suggestions (both submission options available through the dedicated Jira portal).

Email-Based Support System: Separate from the support ticket system that will be used for fielding system issues (bugs) and long-range improvement recommendations.

Insights Gathering and Sprint Planning

Provides client with pertinent and authentic feedback and opinions from the system’s core users; learnings and inbound suggestions dictate Post-Deployment Support workstream priorities and future system development work.

User Feedback Gathering and Organization: Adept Dynamics utilizes a systematized information gathering process to record/organize feedback from the system’s core users. By utilizing its “front-line” position receiving support tickets, Adept Dynamics is well positioned to gather and synthesize authentic user-feedback.

Development Planning/Phasing : As user-feedback is gathered (in both reactive and proactive channels), Adept Dynamics sets up dedicated development sprint planning meeting with the client to plan all post launch development work. Sprint planning meetings focus on prioritizing bug fixes against longer term development work (new system capabilities).

Determining Best Path Forward

Whether it’s been years or months since an organization launched Microsoft Dynamics, there is immense value in taking stock of where your system is now and determining where you want to go next.

Adept Dynamics is equally proficient at fine-tuning and improving existing Microsoft Dynamics instances as we are at implementing the technology for the first time.

When beginning a Dynamics optimization project, we start with a deep dive evaluation of the current technology stack.  We speak with stakeholders and end users to learn about what is working and what needs improvement. From there, we can determine how to maximize a team's existing system.

After an initial audit of your existing environment and technology stack and detailed discussions with key stakeholders, we present our recommended optimization paths.

Optimized Pathways

Version Upgrades: If your team is running an older version of Dynamics, it may no longer be supported by Microsoft. Upgrading to the latest version might be the right action.

Streamlining: If your team is running your business relying on disparate applications, we may recommend bringing those workloads within Dynamics. Whether that means deploying third-party applications that function as a replacement to existing software solutions or utilizing middleware products to integrate key data points, you will get the most value from Dynamics when all the information you team needs is centralized.

Reporting and Budgeting: Is your team getting the most out of your company's Dynamics data? If the native report writer isn’t meeting the mark, there’s no shortage of data improvement options to explore.

Unique to You: Every business is unique. At Adept Dynamics, we welcome the challenge to understand every client's unique requirements and define solutions specific to their business needs.

Customer Engagement Consultation
Multiple Portal Solutions

Understanding Your Organization's Goals

Microsoft Power Apps Portal provide a wide range of customer engagement capabilities to organizations of all types and sizes. Whether setup for customers, external partners, or employees – web portals provide a convenient and secure way for an organization’s most important stakeholders to securely access pertinent data and insights.  

While some clients already know which stakeholder groups they want to engage through a portal, many business leaders are unsure where to begin. Adept Dynamics offers in-depth strategy sessions led by our Power Platform subject matter experts to help provide direction and make determinations. Through these fact-finding sessions, we determine how a Power Apps Portal solution can be customized to meet our clients’ unique business objectives.  

Find The Right Platform For Your Organization

From any of the Microsoft Dynamic Customer Engagement (Dynamics 365) or Dataverse environments, Adept Dynamics can provide different portal types designed for a wide range of applications and stakeholder purposes:

Customer Self-Service Portal: A customer oriented self-service portal that allows customers the ability to access self-service information and user-support resources (helping to drastically reduce onerous and expensive customer support expenditures). Customer portals also allow users the ability to create and view their submitted case progress and submit experience feedback (helping to build customer loyalty and trust).

Partner Portal: A partner portal allows an organization’s most important external stakeholders (i.e., distributors, suppliers, partners, regulators, etc.) access to designated information that’s pertinent to them and their professional interactions with a business. Partner portals make important business interactions simple while further integrating a business’ most important external stakeholders deeper into their ongoing operations.  

Employee Self-Service Portal: An employee self-service portal is a significant, low-cost step towards a well-informed and motivated workforce. These portal help organizations streamline rote tasks and empower their people by offering easy-to-access and informative resources.

Community Portal: A community portal leverages peer-to-peer interactions between customers and experts to organically grow the catalog of available knowledge using articles, forums, and blogs.

Portal From Blank: Adept Dynamics can support our clients with a wide range of unique customer engagement solutions; our team of Power Platforms experts are experienced at creating wholly unique portals designated for both external and internal audiences.  

Business Automation Consultation
Custom Solutions
Integrations

Automate Processes

Power Automate is transformational tool that enables business the ability to operate at increased efficiency. Power Automate aims to make recurring processes run independently, faster, and with more accurate results…allowing an organization’s people to focus on more important tasks.

Need to automate a business process or repetitive task but lack the resources or automation expertise? Adept Dynamics’ team of Power Automate experts work hand-in-hand with our clients to define an automation project’s scope and set its KPIs. From there, our team can design and deliver a transformational automation solution.

Optimize Processes

Many organizations are finding themselves in situations where their business applications aren’t keeping up with changing technologies, environments, and most importantly – shifting customer demands.  

Adept Dynamics’ Power Platform experts are experienced in helping our clients conceptualize, plan, and implement automation processes that are custom built for our clients’ unique business models, long-term objectives, and workforce cultures.  

No matter the level of customization we bring to an automation solution, we prioritize three key factors:

Governance: We ensure that data is accessible only to the team members that our clients designate as approved recipients. Whether for role relevance or confidentiality purposes, we work with our clients to ensure that data access is properly controlled.

Repeatable Patterns and Templates: When building custom implementations, we’re extremely careful to avoid any duplication of work scenarios – we understand that the metric for a successful automation project is less routine work.  

Organizational benchmark tracking: From the onset of an automation project, we work with our clients to determine and set both short and long-term project objectives. These benchmarks help Power Automate enabled teams more accurate tracking of how the system is affecting organizational processes and metrics while also ensuring that automated processes are consistently optimized.

Merge Solutions

Power Automate can be integrated with nearly any business technology that our clients are already leveraging. We utilize Microsoft’s catalog of pre-built connectors to ensure that our business automation solutions fit seamlessly within existing technology frameworks. Our team’s proficiency at seamless integrations allows our clients to easily move their data and manage their workflows across multiple, disparate systems. Power Automate supports connections to both cloud and on-premises applications, including legacy systems that lack an API.  

Power Automate is more than software. It’s a tool to make your business run at its most efficient levels.

Stakeholder Incorporation
Governance Strategy
Data Acquisition
Data Reporting Processes

Stakeholder Trust

Building an effective business intelligence program that’s both self-sufficient and manageable requires trust from multiple levels of an organization. Similar to our proven Dynamics 365 Stakeholder Incorporation model, we recommend incorporating experienced and trusted team members into the Power BI planning process.

Employee stakeholders provide a business intelligence project with invaluable insight by defining the reporting requirements and other data standards that the technology will need to account for. Adept Dynamics works directly with our clients to help select, brief, and interface with potential project stakeholders. We are comfortable interfacing with these stakeholders through an entire project lifecycle (implementation or optimization). Once a business intelligence project has been successfully completed, project stakeholders continue to serve a critical role as first line experts and advocates. Stakeholders are empowered to provide Power BI guidance and general support to their teammates – helping to further drive Power BI adoption within the wider organization.

Creating Governance Guidelines

When an organization begins on its path to becoming a data-driven organization, we always recommend that they start by defining their governance strategy. By focusing first on the strategic goals that will drive an organization’s data governance framework, follow-on determinations (like data policy and usage processes) come naturally.

Adept Dynamics helps our clients determine a sound data governance strategy that is also in-sync with their team’s unique culture. Because data governance initiatives are most successful when enacted with employee empowerment at the core, rather than control, we help our clients craft and implement lightweight governance models that allow for iterative improvements and fit naturally within a team’s existing workflows. Strong data governance should make it easy for people to do the right thing, with minimal friction.

Robust business intelligence reporting naturally accrues large amounts of business data. An outcome of this data volume uptick is the creation of data sets and insights reports that are meant for limited internal audiences. We help our clients establish data governance policies that help ensure the right data goes to designated personnel.

Proven Data Structure

Business intelligence tools like Power BI are only as effective as their data inputs allow. However, data acquisition/preparation is often considered the most complex and time-consuming business intelligence task. Some experts estimate that as much as 80% of most analytics projects are focused on the interpretation of fragmented or incomplete data. Other data preparation hurdles include having to organize data that lacks coherent structural consistency. Because of these challenges, many business intelligence initiatives never reach their potential.  

Adept Dynamics’ team of Power BI experts are proficient at working with our clients to assess available data and determine what’s most relevant for a team to meet its business intelligence objectives. Once the right data sources have been identified, we can then implement innovative data management processes that organize and integrate data into Power BI.

In our data acquisition engagements, we frequently utilize Power Query: Microsoft’s data transformation and data preparation engine. Power Query touts a cutting-edge graphical interface to help users visualize raw data and assist in its migration to Power BI. Through Power Query, our team can perform the extract, transform, and load (ETL) processing of data quickly and fully optimized for Power BI usage.

Post-Deployment Data Support Enhancements

After implementing and optimizing Power BI, Adept Dynamics client support engagement often continues indefinitely. One of the primary advantages of any good business intelligence tool is mailability and the ability to improve its efficiency gains through iterative fine tuning.

We work with our clients to conceive and establish well-defined Power BI reporting processes that are designed to facilitate the creation of accurate, standardized reports - long after initial system implementation. Our team of Power BI experts are skilled at establishing a macro reporting framework that focuses on:

  1. Ensuring that the most useful and important reports are being generated and that they’re relevant to the organization’s evolving business environment and team member requirements.  
  2. Efficient report creation – getting the most pertinent insights in-front of the team members that need them most (all in an expedient and actionable manner).  
  3. A constant data reconciliation and testing of reports.

Without these critical reporting processes, it’s easy for users to create excessive, inaccurate, or inconsistent reports. Strategic reporting processes are critical for ensure that teams get the most out of cutting-edge business intelligence assets like Power BI.

Strategy (Planning)
Development
Design
Content

Custom Strategy

Our team always lead with strategy. Every project begins by mapping the client’s unique business model, its sector, its competitors, and other critical strategic factors. We view this work as paramount to everything that we do.This ensures that we’re helping our clients accomplish real business objectives through our website solutions.

Custom Development

Our team of expert software developers help to bridge any gaps that can’t be handled through Webflow to ensure that our products are accessible, fast, and high performing – for everyone. We’re well-versed in HTML, CSS, Sass, JavaScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, and Ruby on Rails, and our team can quickly and accurately diagnose issues with any website.

Custom Design

At Adept Dynamics, we use Webflow to quickly bring our designs to life and take them to the highest level. By designing through the lens of the specific audience groups that our clients aim to reach, we create one-of-a-kind digital experiences that have the look and feel required to properly resonate with our clients' key stakeholders.

Custom Content

Our team touts an in-house content strategy team that provides our clients with an opportunity to augment and enhance any website project with custom content. Our content strategy utilizes a bespoke approach of determining a client’s narrative and communications objectives before putting pen to paper.

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Together, we can unlock your organization's full potential.

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