Every chapter earlier in this learning path assumes the person on screen is a logged-in internal user, sitting inside the model-driven app with a full license. Power Pages is Microsoft's answer to the opposite situation: a visitor who isn't an internal user at all, but still needs to see or submit real data from the same Dataverse database.
If the product name is new but the idea isn't, that's because Power Pages used to be called Power Apps portals. The core idea hasn't changed — a real, public-facing website with its own pages and design, reading and writing directly against the same Dataverse database that stores your Accounts, Contacts, and Cases.
- Formerly called Power Apps portals, before Microsoft made it a standalone product
- Reads and writes directly to Dataverse — the same database behind your internal app
- Visitors need no internal user license and no access to the model-driven app
- Common uses: customer self-service, vendor/partner portals, public informational sites
Why not just hand out a normal login?
You could create a regular Dynamics 365 CE user account for every customer or vendor. In practice that falls apart fast:
- Every account needs a full user license
- Every account lands inside the same model-driven app as your staff
- Every account needs careful security-role tuning so one customer never sees another's records
That's the wrong tool for a large, loosely-known audience — it's built for a controlled internal team.
Power Pages solves this differently. It builds a separate, purpose-made website in front of Dataverse, showing visitors only a thin, carefully scoped slice of it. No internal license required, and no risk of a visitor wandering into staff-only screens — those screens simply don't exist on the portal side.
The storefront in front of the back office
Picture a retail business: back-office staff track inventory and pricing in internal systems no customer ever sees. Out front, a storefront window and counter show customers only what they're allowed to see and do — backed the whole time by that same inventory, just not exposed directly.
Everything covered earlier in this learning path — tables, forms, security roles, views — is the back office. Power Pages is the storefront window and counter facing the street.
When you'd reach for it
Power Pages tends to come up in three recurring situations:
- Customer self-service — checking an order status, viewing an invoice, or submitting and tracking a support case without picking up the phone
- Vendor or partner portal — an outside company submitting a purchase order or checking payment status without becoming an employee in your system
- Public informational site — live Dataverse data such as an event calendar or directory, with no login required
| Scenario | Who's visiting | What they typically do |
|---|---|---|
| Customer self-service | Existing customers | Check order/case status, submit a new request |
| Vendor/partner portal | External business partners | Submit documents, check shared records |
| Public informational site | General public | Browse Dataverse-backed content, no login required |
All three share the same pattern: real Dataverse data, shown through a website built for people who should never need to become internal Dynamics 365 CE users.