2017-11-20
Categories: Portals
*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***

Microsoft acquired ADXStudio back in 2015, and although it’s mostly the same functionality, Microsoft Portals does have a few elements that are new. Unfortunately at the moment, the documentation isn’t great, and it’s a bit hit and miss trying to find out how things work. One cool element is the way activities or comments can be displayed to a logged in user.

It took me a while to figure out how everything worked, and I wanted to ONLY display Portal comments, so thought I would post about it here in the hopes it helps someone else in the future.

1. Make sure the Portal Timeline solution is installed – if you have installed the Customer Service or Employee portal, this should be present already. If you don’t have it, you will need to install it first.

2. Next, if you are using a custom entity or an entity that hasn’t already got this enabled by default, made sure Activities is enabled in the Communication & Collaboration area.

3. Add a Timeline section to the form you wish to add to your Entity Form.

4. On the Entity Form, Enable Entity Permissions is selected. Scroll to the bottom of the Entity form and add a new Entity Form Metadata record. Add the type of Timeline. You can then make changes in the settings area as needed.

5. Next, add two different Entity Permission records. One for Activity entity and the other one for the Portal Comment entity. The scope for both should be Parent. The Activity Permissions are set to Read Yes, everything else is No. The Portal Comments Permissions are set to Yes for Read, Create and Append and everything else is No. Set the relationship to an Entity Permission for the entity you are adding the timeline to.

6. Next, go in to the portal Site Settings area and look for CustomerSupport/DisplayAllUserActivitiesOnTimeline. Set this to false so that it doesn’t show all of the activities by default.

7. In the Activities entity, there is a Portal Timeline View. Edit the filter on to only show the Activity Type of Portal Comment.

8. And finally, restart the portal.

Phew! A lot of different steps, but this allows you to use the Portal Comments exclusively for messages back and forth to your clients or employees without worrying about Tasks, Emails and other activities being displayed. Navigate to the record in CRM, then add activity and select Portal Comment. Hope this helps someone in a similar situation! Happy to answer any questions in the comments below. What other cool tricks and tips have you found for Microsoft Portals?

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8 thoughts on “Displaying Comments Only In Microsoft Portals”

  1. Hello Megan ,

    I am new to Dynamic 365 . I am working on a custom entity which will be manipulated using Dynamic 365 Portal . I followed all the steps from your article . But when ever i am trying to add the comment using portal comment , it is showing “We’re sorry, but something went wrong. Please try again, and if this persists, contact the website administrator.” error . Do you have any idea what should be the reason behind it ?

    1. Hi Rohit, thanks for stopping by my site and posting a comment. Are you adding the comment as someone logged in as an admin that has full view of everything in the portal? If not, if you try that does it work then? Or is it all users no matter what their level of access is? Feel free to email me using the form on my contact page if you have more questions.

    2. Hi Rohit,

      I am facing exactly the same issue, when I create a comment on portal its giving me the same error you mentioned. Did you find a solution for the problem you faced?

      Cheers,
      Krutika

    3. Hi Krutika, are you logged in with a user of the portal with Administrator rights? I am NOT talking about someone that is a D365 System Administrator, but someone with the Administrator web role. Most times when you get errors, it’s about permissions for the user logged in.

  2. Yes . Currently i have Admin access on Dynamic 365 . But still it is not working . I tried with user with basic permissions on dynamic 365 and portal but getting same results .

  3. Pingback: Creating Consistent Communication Using Portal Comments - Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community

  4. Hi Megan,
    First of all, thanks for the wonderful post. One of my customer developers followed step by step of your blog and tried to set-up the portal timeline for account entity.

    However they updated me that it’s showing up in the portal in the Account entity form. I am still to visit them and dive deep into their configuration but I did actually had a screen sharing sessions and basic configurations looks fine as you suggested.

    Any pointers why it is not showing up? May be I can have a heads up before I visit them in person.

    Thanks in advance for your co-operation.

    Best Regards
    Debajit

    1. Hi Debajt,

      Thanks so much for the comment, and glad you enjoyed the post! I think maybe you have a typo in your comment…. you said that they updated you that it’s showing up in the portal…. but then state that it isn’t. So guessing it’s not right? Check this post out. It’s about something different to this, but page two shows what you would need to do in order to have the activities show up on an Account entity: https://meganvwalker.com/create-a-portal-inbox-messaging-process – take a look and if you still have questions, feel free to message me using my Contact form.

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