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    Hi all,

    We are looking to link the customer portal from our CRM to our website.  We have our CRM server here and our website is hosted with another organisation.

    Having downloaded the customer portal and had a quick look through the various documentation and a quick browse of the forums there are a few things that I am unsure about and hope that you can help.

    First of all, is Azure a requirement considering we have an on-premise version of the CRM?  Also, is a Windows Live ID required and if so why is this?  I'm not entirely sure what purpose they serve.

    How difficult is it to add the portal to our current website?  The primary purpose of this is to allow customers to access our website and book onto events, allowing us to control this in the CRM.

    If there is anything else that you think we should know before attempting to deploy this then please do let us know.

    Thank you in advance for your help.

    Tuesday, August 14, 2012 2:33 PM

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    You must have made some modifications to the web code.  The customer portal uses ACS for authentication and does not redirect to /pages/login.aspx.  Can you please let me know what modifications you have made to the portal?  If you have downloaded the portal from my blog site, I did modify it to support the membership page, but the login url is /login  and not /Pages/login.aspx.  That said, the error you are having in the default.master page is indicating that the crm entity data source control cannot be found.  There are important things in the web.config, including the following section that will define where the crm: controls should come from (look at the first two tag prefixes):

        <pages viewStateEncryptionMode="Always" validateRequest="true">
      <controls>
        <add tagPrefix="crm" namespace="Site" assembly="Site"/>
        <add tagPrefix="crm" namespace="Microsoft.Xrm.Portal.Web.UI.WebControls" assembly="Microsoft.Xrm.Portal"/>
        <add tagPrefix="events" tagName="EventCalendar" src="~/Controls/EventCalendar.ascx"/>
      </controls>
    </pages>

    Shan McArthur www.shanmcarthur.net Check out the commercial edition of xRM portals @ www.adxstudio.com

    • Marked as answer by RoarCRM Tuesday, September 4, 2012 10:34 AM
    Thursday, August 30, 2012 12:06 PM
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    Any tips on this?

    Thanks.

    Wednesday, August 29, 2012 2:42 PM
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    Hello Roar,

    The portal framework will work in any IIS environment, including Windows Azure, but it does not specifically need Windows Azure.  The customer portal also will work with any traditional SSO solution, any ASP.NET membership provider, and now with the latest update, any federated mechanism including public authentication mechanisms like facebook, google, live ID via Windows Azure ACS. The commercial version from Adxstudio also has a contact membership provider that allows you to use CRM contacts natively for authentication.  The best way to learn about how to adjust the membership providers is to download the modifications I published on my blog site that hook up the customer portal to the ASP.NET Active Directory Membership provider.  See http://community.adxstudio.com/blogs/shan/customer-portal-modifications/

    The customer portal is a full ASP.NET website.  If you want to inject just part of the experience in your existing website, you can certainly do that - it is a standard asp.net site.  It would require a developer to do that.  Other companies host the portal on a separate domain name.  A great example of this is our own community site http://community.adxstudio.com/ which was roughly based on the customer portal then amped up with lots and lots of steriods ;-)  Hosting the site as a seperate domain (or subdomain) doesn't require developers to build it out.

    Good luck!

    Shan McArthur www.shanmcarthur.net Check out the commercial edition of xRM portals @ www.adxstudio.com

    Wednesday, August 29, 2012 9:48 PM
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    Thanks Shan.

    Attempting to deploy the Portal in IIS now, keep receiving the following error when trying to access a page.  Any idea what could be causing this?

    Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:54 AM
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    You must have made some modifications to the web code.  The customer portal uses ACS for authentication and does not redirect to /pages/login.aspx.  Can you please let me know what modifications you have made to the portal?  If you have downloaded the portal from my blog site, I did modify it to support the membership page, but the login url is /login  and not /Pages/login.aspx.  That said, the error you are having in the default.master page is indicating that the crm entity data source control cannot be found.  There are important things in the web.config, including the following section that will define where the crm: controls should come from (look at the first two tag prefixes):

        <pages viewStateEncryptionMode="Always" validateRequest="true">
      <controls>
        <add tagPrefix="crm" namespace="Site" assembly="Site"/>
        <add tagPrefix="crm" namespace="Microsoft.Xrm.Portal.Web.UI.WebControls" assembly="Microsoft.Xrm.Portal"/>
        <add tagPrefix="events" tagName="EventCalendar" src="~/Controls/EventCalendar.ascx"/>
      </controls>
    </pages>

    Shan McArthur www.shanmcarthur.net Check out the commercial edition of xRM portals @ www.adxstudio.com

    • Marked as answer by RoarCRM Tuesday, September 4, 2012 10:34 AM
    Thursday, August 30, 2012 12:06 PM
    Moderator