Diving into new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portal capabilities and official guidance for upgrades from Adxstudio Portals

Now officially referred to as "portal capabilities for Dynamics 365", the push to the cloud continues for Microsoft with a new portals release and official documentation for legacy Adxstudio customers to upgrade to the latest version.

More details on upgrade and migration

Since the announcement in September 2017 that the legacy version of Adxstudio Portals (version 7) would no longer be supported or updated past August 1, 2018, customers and partners have been waiting for official guidance from Microsoft as to how to transition to the new platform.  While bits and pieces of information about the process did trickle out from community members over the past few months, in February Microsoft released their official documentation.

The documentation, available as a downloadable PDF, does a great job of providing the background and history of Portals, from their beginnings as Adxstudio Portals, through the evolution to the Microsoft cloud-hosted offering.  It also provides a comparison between the two versions, and is very clear about the fact that, despite sharing some features and code, they are two very distinct products.  This comparison is very useful for customers and partners trying to understand what changes will be necessary when upgrading.

The comparison highlights some features that existed in Adxstudio Portals but are not in the new version:

• SharePoint Document Management
• Shopping Cart and Payment

While these are probably the most popular features that are missing from the new version, it's important to note that this is not an exhaustive list; anyone undertaking an upgrade should validate all features as part of the process.  As an example, Event Management also does not exist in the new version.  Microsoft's guidance on these missing ...