Microsoft Power Pages

[Guest ShabnamMohammadi]

Power page is the fifth addition to the Power Platform. The power platform turns great ideas into solutions. Power platform is the collection of Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agent and Power Pages. Power pages are the no-code and low-code solutions that empower you to build scalable, and secure business websites.

 

Microsoft Power Pages previously called Power Apps portals enables development of external-facing websites with the low-code simplicity and integrated capabilities of Power Platform. With the new Power Pages name comes new positioning. This product sits within the low-code, no-code industry and offers a wider set of design, development, and security options that makes it well-suited to be a category leader in the enterprise portal/external business website space.

 

Power Pages is built upon the functionality of PowerApps Portals with a range of additional features that enable the creation of more engaging sites and featuring a new design studio and templates. Both PowerApps Portals and Power Pages are suitable for building external facing sites. PowerApps Portals requires at least a basic understanding of code, whereas Power Pages makes building external websites more accessible to users from non-technical backgrounds, with a low to no-code builder and rich ready to use templates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Features of Power Pages

 

• Available in your Power Platform and Dynamics 365 regions.
  
• Quick and easy Get Started Experience.
  
• Use a prebuilt template or create your own website using blank.
  
• Use bootstrap themes to create beautiful responsive sites that work on every surface
  
• Use prebuilt components like forms, views, charts, dashboards etc. to surface Dataverse data
  
• Define basic configuration for views and forms to quickly create new or add existing.
  
• Advanced form/view capabilities like CAPTCHA, geolocation, custom actions, workflow actions.
  
• All Website users are modelled as contacts in the Dataverse database.
  
• Self Service Profile Management right within the website.
  
• Allow users to link identities from multiple identity providers.
  
• A robust Security Model to provide Role based access to users, handles page-access rules, entity permissions based on account / contact / user scopes.
  
• Ability to create reusable web templates for defining page layouts as well as web services.
  
• Ability to access Dataverse data and enable personalization using liquid templating language.
  
• Dataverse server-side constructs like code plugins, workflows as well as Microsoft flow to extend business logic.
  
• Use Portal Web APIs for interacting with all data programmatically.
  
• integrate PowerBI embed components like reports, dashboards and tiles.
  
• Integrate SharePoint, Azure Blob storage as document storage.
  
• Integrate with Azure AD B2C as Identity provider.
  
• Integrate with Azure Application Insights for usage telemetry.
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Differences Between PowerApps Portals and Microsoft Power Pages

 

• Licenses and Microsoft Roles – Portals requires your site creators to be assigned roles as either Global Administrators, Dynamics’ 365 administrators, or Power Platform administrators to create portals. Whereas Pages requires only an additional license
  
• Experience Level – Portals require at least a basic understanding of HTML, CCS, JavaScript of Liquid to customize your sites and develop a decent User Experience. On the other hand, Pages allow your creators to build low-code/no-code sites where the knowledge of code is useful but by no means essential.
  
• Mobile Site Previews – with PowerApps Portals you must retype the link if you want to preview your site design on a mobile device, on Power Pages you can simple scan a QR code using said device and have a more seamless experience.
  
• Developer Experience – PowerApps Portals Studio provides limited configuration capabilities so to meet your website requirements you have to navigate away from the studio to add in other capabilities like identity providers ect. In Power Pages Design studio however, everything is centralized and organized within the developer's workspaces to enable makers to add capabilities as required without leaving the studio, offering a more cohesive and smooth builder experience.
  
• Provisioning Time – Websites built with Portals take far longer to provision than those built using Pages.
  

 

 

 

Security:

 

Infrastructure Security

 

• Runs on Microsoft Azure Platform utilizing prebuilt Azure Security foundation.
  
• Managed Infrastructure with Microsoft defender ensuring real time protection for Infrastructure components.
  
• Continuous threat detection and monitoring at both Infrastructure and Networking level.
  

Application Security

 

• Inbuilt Web Application Firewall providing protection against OWASP Top 10 attacks.
  
• Robust RBAC permission model to provide control over data access.
  
• Ability to set HTTP headers like CSP, CORS to have control over aspects like JS sources, CORS policy, Framing protecting against common web vulnerabilities.
  
• Built in protection against CSRF attacks and programmatic control to prevent XSS attacks.
  
• Complete encryption of data in transit or at rest.
  

 

 

Limitations

 

1. If your administrator disabled the self-service sign-up, you won't be able to sign up for a trial of Power Pages.
   
2. When you create a site for the first time in a new environment, you won't be able to rename the environment; however, the ability to rename the environment when it's created will be available in a future update.
   
3. The code editor doesn't support editing header or footer code.
   
4. Buttons added in portals built with the starter template can't be resized.
   
5. Power Pages doesn't support Google Fonts due to privacy concerns.
   
6. The section padding/margin settings feature in the Style workspace won't work for portals built on starter templates.
   
7. A Power Pages website in private mode will not work when you disable Azure Active Directory authentication. Azure Active Directory authentication is enabled by default when the website is provisioned.
   

 

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