Change the Portal after Installing different Portal in Dynamics 365 Instance

Hello Everyone,

Recently I got into one situation where I had to Uninstall the Customer Service Portal and had to Install Custom Portal. You may also have the requirement to change the Portal Template after installing it in CRM,

If you want to Reset or UnInstall the Portal from your CRM Instance, Delete the solution in below order: I have checked this order for Community and Customer Portal only. For other portals, it may differ in order. I would appreciate if you check at your end and update in case of any discrepancy.

To uninstall we need to follow the steps in reverse order.

1. Undo all portal customizations.

• Remove the portal related components from your solution
• Remove the portal forms and views from the Custom App/ Sitemap that you created.
• Remove all portal related customizations performed – remove portal related fields on your forms/ plugins/ JS/ Workflows/ actions etc.

2. Uninstall specific solutions.

3. Uninstall core solutions.

For example, for a community portal, uninstall below solutions first (hopefully, I got the order right).

• MicrosoftIdeasWorkflows

• MicrosoftIdeas

• Microsoft forums

• Microsoft blogs

• Feedback

• KnowledgeManagement

• CustomerService

• CommunityPortal

Then uninstall the core solutions in this order.

• MicrosoftWebForms

• WebNotification

• MicrosoftIdentity

• MicrosoftIdentityWorkflows

• MicrosoftIdentitySystemWorkflows

• MicrosoftCrmPortalBaseWorkflows

• MicrosoftCrmPortalBaseSystemWorkflows

• MicrosoftCrmPortalBase

• MicrosoftCrmPortalDependencies

You may take help of below article in order to uninstall your Portal Instance.

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/dynamicscrmbestpractices/archive/2017/10/14/dynamics-365-uninstalling-microsoft-portals-steps 

If you face any issue while uninstallation. Check below article:

https://community.dynamics.com/enterprise/b/dynamics365portalssupport/archive/2017/02/27/portal-troubleshooting-part-three-uninstalling-portal-solutions

You may also reset your CRM Instance in order to reset/uninstall your portal. But it will clean up your whole CRM customization and data as well. Depend upon your situation you can go ahead with any of the approaches.

To Reset your CRM Instance check below:

https://community.dynamics.com/enterprise/b/beardedcrmguy/archive/2017/06/20/reset-a-production-instance-of-dynamics-365-crm

or

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crmpowerobjects/archive/2016/09/02/how-to-reset-production-instances-in-dynamics-crm-online

Now come to what actually we are going to achieve:

Suppose you have installed the Customer Portal in your CRM Instance. Now you are planning to change it to another portal template (Let Say: Custom Portal) in order to mitigate some requirements or client needs.

Here are the steps to do the same:

• Uninstall the old CRM Portal (Let say: Customer Self-Service Portal)

• Install the New Portal in your CRM Instance (Let say: Custom Portal). Can check here for installation steps. Don't configure it.

• You will not be able to configure or change your portal URL as it had already been configured for the old portal template. You just need to point it to the newly installed portal.

• Click on Manage Dynamic 365 Instance from Left Navigation

• Select Admin Account under Select Portal Administrator

• Select Portal Audience to Customer

• Select Portal to be deployed to Custom Portal

• and Submit.

Cheers.