Any architect/analyst that is advising Power Apps Portals or the new name Power Pages as a solution to a customer didn’t weigh the pros and cons properly.
For a quick-and-dirty dashboard for customer tickets it’s fine. You tweak the design a little bit, change the logo and you are good-to-go! Done in a couple of hours.
But if you want to build a proper Customer self-service portal er even (part of) your website then stop and rethink if this is the way to go. Why?
- Customer self-service portals have existed for ages and there are very mature products on the market. There are even solutions that are combined with a CMS and can do your whole website. They are usually cheap or even free because of the competition.
- For a professional design than you need a designer and web developer. Web developers don’t know Power Pages, there are no web developers you can hire for it (for now). So, if you can find one it is going to be more expensive than a web developer for other platforms and it will take longer.
- Most of the time a Dynamics 365 developer is the one who is doing the changes in the portal. There are not a lot of Dynamics 365 developers, there are even less that know Power Pages and even then, they are usually not great in web development. So, you are letting expensive and scarce Dynamics 365 developers do the work of a web developer.
- I see Portal implementations with Power Pages going over budget every time. It takes 3-4 times longer than expected because of the knowledge gap. Implementers don’t know it well and there isn’t a lot of info in the community.
- The lifecycle of your customer-facing websites is quite different than your ‘internal’ business apps, it is difficult to align the software development. Power Pages feature is to build your portal upon your business apps infrastructure and data. But in my view, these deserve to be different silos with their own environment, their own DevOps, and their own developers. These are separate worlds.
Just use a mature portal/CMS software in the market, use cheap web developers to customize it and then integrate it with the Power Platform/ Dynamics 365.
What do you think? Change my mind!
