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Portal export noob questions for a test environment

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Posted on by chrisOrtiz

Hello everyone, I am fairly new to portals. I have a live portal website in my production environment and I need to make modifications but do not want to make them on the live portal since it is already up and running. I want to export the portal into another environment to test the changes first. I read the documentation here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/admin/migrate-portal-configuration but have further questions before I start the export:

1) Should the environment I export the portal into be production or a sandbox environment (does it matter)?

2) Will my live portal website be affected by the export? I do not want the live portal to be affected.

3) I have an ssl certificate on the live portal, what will happen to this once it is exported? Will there be 2 duplicate websites with the same url? I worry that If I make a change in the testing environment that it will make those changes onto the live website. Thank you experts!

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OOlashyn 3,496 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @chrisOrtiz ,

Find answers to your questions below:

1) It doesn't matter, you can use whatever environment fits you. But using a production environment for development purpose sounds a bit like overkill.

2) No, your live portal won't be affected by export. Basically, you are just copying some records and configuration and there is no harm in that.

3) Well you need to have a new portal already provisioned in your dev environment before moving your existing portal (you need to provision a portal of the same type as you have in prod). Because this is a different portal it will have a different url and won't have your ssl certificate (that's one of the reasons why you should avoid hardcoded urls in your code).

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Fubar 8,338 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Just adding to the post above.
3. You also want the Portal type to be the same as what you have in Prod (e.g. blank and blank, or Customer Service and Customer service, and not a Prod customer service back to a blank starter portal).

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chrisOrtiz 75 on at

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Thank you so much for this information, I am on the way to making this happen

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chrisOrtiz 75 on at

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I completed the export and imported into my new environment (a sandbox environment) but the portal still looks like a standard portal out of the box. I am also getting the trial message below:
When I open the portal, it seems that my export merged with the basic portal creation. The image below shows 2 tabs that are from my website I was trying to export but has no functionality, you can also see there are 2 home tabs. What I did was first created the new environment, then I imported the solutions from my original environment. Then I created a blank portal, once that was done I followed the documentation in exporting my original portal then imported onto the new environment. Any idea where I went wrong? Thanks

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Fubar 8,338 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Any Custom Entities etc you need to move across as Solution Files, the Portal move only moves the structural items Pages, Forms etc.

Also, items that you have deleted from the source will still exist in the target - so you just have to clean them up edit the navigation etc
Sometimes, if the internal GUIDs are different you can get the Home x 2 type stuff (usually if it is the same Portal type the guids are the same), theres also a setting in the Data Migration tool schema to match on Guid (this is usually set on, but its possible something has changed and its not on for all the portal entities)

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chrisOrtiz 75 on at

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Thank you, I did have everything under one solution and my one table and form are all there. The migration did not seem to move much since there is not content of functionality when i select the highlighted tabs. An odd thing I noticed under portal management is 2 website, the one I exported and the one portals created.
Should I delete the portal and start a new fresh migration?

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OOlashyn 3,496 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @chrisOrtiz,

Sorry for the long reply. It does look like that it created a new website record instead of updating an existing one. It might be because as @Fubar pointed out guids are different or there was a portal type mismatch. Honestly, I didn't use a Configuration Migration tool in a while and would propose you try XrmToolBox plugin - Portal Records Mover that I am using constantly. If your portal type is the same it would update records, and if different will ask with which portal to related transferred data.

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chrisOrtiz 75 on at

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Thanks everyone for the help, I had place a ticket with Microsoft and it took a while but I was able to successfully migrate. The step that was missing was copying the environment from the source onto the target. That made sure everything was there, I used the Configuration Migration tool. I have done this twice now to create a testing and development environment.

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