Author: Elizabeth Akinfiieva, Senior Power Platform Developer
The Microsoft Power Pages was announced in a preview on the 24th of May 2022 as a fifth product in the Microsoft Power Platform family.
It is a more advanced way of creating websites, similar to how we are using and building the Power Apps Portals. Yet, it is a separate application type (it has its own icon), built on top of Dataverse. It means you still can use all the advantages of Dataverse tables, processes, connectors etc.
There are no licencing details yet, but you can start using it as a trial version for 30 days. The same as in Portals, each Power Pages site will be created as a trial and after 30 days you have 7 days to convert it into production or it will be suspended and deleted.
Let’s try to create a website here make.powerpages.microsoft.com/
I want to see what can I get from a template, so I will select a “Schedule meetings with a financial institution”. At the time of writing this overview, some of the templates are announced but not available.
So, I proceed with the selected template…
Give a name to the site and specify the address:
Here is my new site is getting ready!
After a while, I received an email from Microsoft that the Scheduling site deployment failed. Happens in a preview.
So, let’s move on to a site with the default template.
It was created without any issues.
In the edit mode, there is a nice feature to preview the site on your mobile:
Btw, when I opened make.powerapps.com – the site was of the type Portal.
In the Portal Management application, there was a new Website – “Site Default – sitedefault”.
So, you can set up your Power Pages from the Portal Management. Or, use a modern Power Pages editor.
It means all Portal features will work for Pages.
In the list of Solutions, there was a new empty Managed solution created “Default Portal Template” with publisher “Microsoft”.
The second solution “Book a meeting controls” was probably created for the template “Schedule meetings with a financial institution”. It contains two custom controls.
Going back to the Pages editor, the cool feature is that in this editor you can change tables. Be aware when creating new entities – they are created in a Default solution with the default prefix.
Column creation, forms and views setup is pretty much the same as in PowerApps maker portal.
The choice creation is now more user-friendly. You can set colours and see Values in the same form.
The page setup is a lot smoother than in the Portal editor:
There is a setup of permissions, the backend is the same as in Portal Management, but the UI is more clear:
To sum up, the Pages is a Portal application with a new editor. At least from the first look 🙂
I will proceed with an investigation in the next post. See you!
