Power Pages Customer and Vendor Portal Development builds a secure, external-facing portal on Microsoft Power Pages and Dataverse — customer self-service, vendor onboarding, request and status tracking — with Microsoft Entra External ID sign-in, a permission model hardened for external access, and licensing sized in plain English before you buy anything. Typical builds start from $6,950, quoted fixed in writing before work begins, and take about 4 weeks from kickoff to launch.
Right now, your customers and vendors probably interact with you through email threads and attachments: a vendor sends a W-9 and insurance certificate to someone's inbox, a customer emails to ask where their request stands, and your team re-keys all of it into internal systems. A portal changes that. Customers submit and track their own requests; vendors onboard themselves through guided forms with document upload and approval steps; everyone sees status without asking. And because Power Pages sits on Dataverse, everything external users submit lands directly in the same data platform your internal Power Apps, Power Automate flows, and Dynamics 365 apps already use — no re-keying, no sync jobs to babysit. Two things decide whether an external portal succeeds, and both are where we spend disproportionate care. The first is security: a portal is exposed to the internet, so web roles, table permissions, and page permissions must be configured so each signed-in customer or vendor sees exactly their own records and nothing else — we verify that with explicit permission test cases before go-live, not by assumption. The second is licensing: Power Pages is priced in capacity packs of authenticated and anonymous users per site per month, and sizing it wrong is the most common budget surprise in portal projects. We size your capacity before launch, and if you buy the subscriptions through us, you pay Microsoft's published list prices — the same price as buying direct. Sign-in uses Microsoft Entra External ID by default, so customers and vendors get self-service registration or invitations with modern authentication — no passwords stored in your portal, and no accounts created in your internal directory.
Discovery — who the external users are, expected volumes, the processes moving into the portal, data sources, and compliance constraints; you receive a fixed written quote before work begins.
Design — page map, form designs, Dataverse data model, security model, identity approach, and branding; you approve before build.
Build — Dataverse schema, the Power Pages site, forms, lists, dashboards, and branding.
Identity and security — Entra External ID configuration, web roles, table and page permissions, and a hardening review of everything exposed to the internet.
Workflow wiring — notifications, approvals, and status updates through Power Automate.
Testing and UAT — functional test cases plus explicit permission test cases, run with your pilot users and a sample customer or vendor account.
Licensing and go-live — final capacity sizing, subscription purchase guidance, production launch, and custom domain setup where in scope.
Handoff — administrator documentation, a training session, and agreement on any ongoing support you want.
Power Pages is Microsoft's platform for building secure, data-driven websites for people outside your organization — customers, vendors, and partners. It is part of the Power Platform and sits on Dataverse, the same data backbone used by Power Apps and Dynamics 365, which is exactly why it works so well as a front door to your internal processes.
Whatever the scoped process needs: submit and track support or service requests, check order or case status without calling you, complete vendor onboarding with guided forms and document uploads, respond to approval steps, and update their own contact and company information. Each engagement scopes a concrete set of use cases in discovery — the 'from $6,950' figure covers a focused portal, not an unlimited feature list.
Through Microsoft Entra External ID by default — Microsoft's identity service for customer- and partner-facing applications. Users can be invited or register themselves, and authentication is handled by Microsoft's identity platform rather than passwords stored in your portal. External users do not get accounts in your internal company directory. Other identity providers can be discussed in discovery if you have one in place.
Power Pages is licensed by capacity: packs of authenticated users per site per month, and larger packs of anonymous visitors. Your real monthly cost depends on how many customers or vendors sign in, which is why the sizing memo comes before go-live, not after. If you buy the subscriptions through us, you pay Microsoft's published list prices — the same price as buying direct; our margin comes from Microsoft, not from a markup on you.
This is the core engineering of any external portal. Access is enforced in Dataverse through web roles and table permissions, so records are filtered by the signed-in user's identity and organization — not just hidden by the page design. We write explicit permission test cases ('vendor A must not see vendor B's documents') and run them before go-live, and you receive the documented results.
Typical builds start from $6,950, and every engagement gets a fixed written quote before work begins — you pay after you approve delivery. The final price depends on how many processes move into the portal, the number of forms and integrations, and how much workflow automation sits behind them.
About 4 weeks for a typical scoped portal — discovery and design in the first week, build and security configuration in the middle two, testing and go-live in the last. Multi-process portals or ones with heavier integrations take longer, and the quote states the expected duration.
Yes. The portal is styled with your logo, colors, and layout, and can run on a custom domain (for example portal.yourcompany.com). Both are standard parts of the build when in scope.
Anything already on Dataverse — Power Apps, Power Automate, Dynamics 365 — connects natively, with no integration layer at all. Systems outside the Power Platform connect through Power Platform connectors or APIs; straightforward connections are scoped into the build, and anything needing custom API or connector development is quoted separately so the fixed price stays honest.
A guided flow: the vendor registers or accepts an invitation, completes structured forms (company details, banking, compliance questions), uploads required documents such as tax forms and insurance certificates, and submits. Your team reviews and approves inside your existing tools, the vendor sees status at every step, and reminders chase missing items automatically — instead of someone in your office chasing attachments by email.
Power Pages supports anonymous visitors — useful for public knowledge-base pages or a pre-registration landing page — and they are licensed in their own capacity packs. But if your scenario is primarily a high-traffic public website rather than a signed-in business portal, Power Pages is usually the wrong economics, and we will tell you so in discovery.
Your team — that is the point of the handoff documentation and administrator training. Managing users, reviewing submissions, and editing content are designed to be your administrators' daily work. If you want us on call for changes and troubleshooting, we can arrange ongoing support separately.
Usually yes, for the people who process portal submissions inside Dataverse — for example through a model-driven Power App or Dynamics 365. This is one of the most commonly missed line items in portal budgets, which is why the licensing sizing memo covers internal users as well as external capacity.