Tips for Deploying Microsoft Power Pages

What is Power Pages?

Power Pages is a secure, enterprise-grade, low-code Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. It allows you to create, host, and manage modern external-facing business websites. Power Pages empowers you to quickly configure and deploy websites across web browsers and devices with low to no code. You can use it to create external-facing websites that allow users outside their organizations to sign in with various identities, create and view data in Dataverse, or even browse content anonymously. If you’re interested in building web applications without extensive coding, Power Pages is a great choice.

Deploy Power Pages via Solutions

If you recently created the Power Pages site, it’s likely using the Enhanced Data Model as this is no longer in preview. The Enhanced Data Model helps streamline your Power Page deployments in a Dataverse Solution. This is incredibly helpful if your team already relies on deployments via Solutions and DevOps Pipelines. If you’re organization has an older version of Power Pages, MS does not currently offer a way to upgrade it to the new Enhanced Data Model, but you can evaluate if it makes sense to re-create the Power Pages site.

Use Site Settings to store variables

Natively, Power Pages doesn’t offer much to store variables that could change between your Dev, QA and Prod environments. For example, if you wanted to create a web link to a 3rd party website that also contains a Dev, QA and Prod environment (e.g. dev-someWebsite.com, qa-someWebsite.com, etc.) you would have to hard code the ‘External Url’ and manually update the value each time the Power Pages is redeployed. Alternatively, you can create a Site Setting and use JavaScript to reference that.

Whichever approach you choose, you’ll want to keep a list of Site Components that should be deployed once and then removed from the main solution that you will re-deploy on a regular basis as new enhancements are implemented. That way, the values won’t get overwritten on deployment!

Contact Beringer Today!

We love to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solutions here at Beringer.  We’ve been working with Microsoft Dynamics since its inception, and we’re always finding innovative ways to implement the latest tools and help automate business processes.

Beringer Technology Group, a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Business Applications, specializing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and CRM for Distribution also provides expert Managed IT Services, Backup and Disaster Recovery, Cloud Based Computing, Email Security Implementation and Training, Unified Communication Solutions, and Cybersecurity Risk Assessment.