Despite the fact that Microsoft will now only be selling Adxstudio Portals v7.0 on an exception basis (see here), there are still hundreds of portal implementations that still being deployed and supported.
A common method of portal deployment is to deploy the master portal directly to Azure.
As anyone who has deployed an Adxstudio Portal knows, it requires a user account in Dynamics 365 in order to access and display information from the database to the portal.
Typically this should be a non-interactive user account.
Depending on security policy setup in Office365, eventually the password of the dedicated portal user will expire, and anyone accessing the portal will get an error. Once the password is reset in Office365, it will need to be updated in the Master Portal application.
The following steps explain how to reset the password. While this should be a fairly simple function, I haven’t found anywhere the steps to do this, so here they are:
You will need the following:
- Login to the Azure Dashboard to where you Portal has been published.
- The Azure URL to your Portal
-
(e.g. https://<<portalname>>.azurewebsites.net)
- The username and new password to the Dynamics 365 Portal User.
- The URL to your Dynamics 365 instance.
Steps to Reset Password
Using a variation (add “scm”) of the azure websites URL, navigate to
https://<portalname>.scm.azurewebsites.net
You will be prompted to login with your Azure Dashboard login.
You then will be presented with the Kudu screen.
Click on “Debug Console” and then “CMD”.
Portal Connection Wizard Method
If you set up the Portal using the Connection Wizard (Screen below) then your Portal connection is stored in the settings.xml in the App_Data folder.
In the Kudu console, you will see a file folder structure. Navigate to Site->wwwroot->App_data. Click on the “Delete” icon on the left to delete the “settings.xml” file.
Of course, make sure that you want to zap that file.
Once the file is deleted then navigate to the portal. The portal connection wizard should (re)appear. You will need to all your settings (Dynamics 365 URL, Username, password) The wizard will note that there is already a binding for the site. Click “Apply”
Web.Config Method
If you modified the web.config initially to connect to Dynamics 365, the same method can be used to directly edit the web.config file and update the connection strings.
I hope this information helps. It’s a bit embarrassing but this was something that eluded me and more than a couple times I re-deployed the full portal from Visual Studio just to change the password. Thankfully I found these steps and now updating passwords is quick and very easy.
Cheers
Nick
ReadyXRM 