Power Pages or Power Apps for external user access scenario?

(2) Share

Report

Posted on by chrgosselin

I'm wondering which solution (Power Pages or Power Apps) works best for the following external user access scenario:

We have an existing D365 Customer Service application (no restricted tables used)
We want to give some of our external subcontractors access to part of the application, so they can contribute to our business processes (~300 users from ~80 external subcontracting organizations)
External users need access to about 30% of the existing application (about 80% of it read-only and 20% read/write), including:
- Viewing our customer records
- Reading and adding notes to those customer records
- Reading and updating activities (e.g. appointments, phone calls, tasks, etc.) that have been assigned to them
- Eventually viewing documents associated to a customer record (stored in SharePoint Online)
These external users don't exist in our internal Microsoft Entra ID and use a variety of identity services (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, etc.)

My understanding is that Power Pages is better suited for scenarios where we would want to give our customers access to their own records. For cases where we want to give access to subcontractors, a Power Apps application would allow us to manage these external users and application security effectively the same way we do our internal users (users/security roles vs. contacts-authenticated users/web roles).

Since these external users are essentially an extension of our internal user base, I'm leaning toward a separate Power Apps application (Per App license) in the existing D365 environment in conjunction with Microsoft Entra External ID (B2B Collaboration).

I'm interested to hear about your experience and opinions on this particular use case.

Thanks in advance.

Christian

Categories:

General topics

I have the same question (0)

All responses (3)

Answers (0)

CL-26081237-0 3 on at

Like (1)

Report

I'm looking to do something rather similar. Did you come up with a solution for this?

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

MJWhite 338 on at

Like (1)

Report

Hi there

Here's the approach I am adopting. Power Pages is still using Active Directory (AD) rather than Entra, so I'll use AD for consistency with what is on the screens.

I have configured the site to use AD for internal users (including contractors who have AD accounts) and AD B2C for external users:

With the above configured, users will see the sign in screen below:

Registered AD users should be logged on on the click of the button or may have to confirm which Microsoft account to use.

AD B2C uses will see the screen below and registered AD B2C users will be able to log on:

I then use web roles, page permissions, table permissions and assignment of contacts to web roles to control what different groups of users (internal or external) can do.

For example, an internal user with site administrator role would see this:

An internal user with a more restrictive role would see this:

An external user would only see this:

I didn't want a separate Power apps app and Power Pages site, as I just wanted a single solution to manage internal and external users. It is possible that the complexity of requirements necessitates a Power apps solution for internal users, but I am trying to avoid it if at all possible (lower development and maintence costs...).

Hope that helps.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
MJWhite 338 on at

Like (1)

Report
Hi again

A couple of points to clarify on yesterday's post:

I can assign internal users to the restrictive role shown for external users, if they need the same basic functionality

I can also assign external users to the less restrictive roles shown for internal users e.g. Customers or Suppliers on project teams, consultants...

For me, being able to work with internal and external users in the same way was a key requirement, as participants on events can be a mix of internal and external users and I may want to build capability for 360 degree feedback in the future.

Power Pages is essential for external users. So far, all the the basic CRUD functionality can be done in Power Pages. The jury is still out on whether Power Pages will cut it for the more complex requirments because I haven't built them yet.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No