Plan your Power Pages project

This article serves as guidance for enterprise teams working on projects and may go beyond the scope of a maker creating a site for a specific business need. Creating a plan with clear outcomes and expectations is always good practice, regardless of the size of your project.

As you begin to plan your first Power Pages project, consider the following questions:

• Who will use my site?
• What will my users do?
• What text and content the site will have?
• What is shown publicly and what is secured?
• What will users use to sign in or register?
• How the data will be segmented after users sign in?
• How will my users find my site?

Answering these questions helps guide discussions as you embark on your project.

Audience

Our default template has basic web pages configured to help you get started. These template pages aren't secured and contain sample text and images for inspiration only. As you develop content and data experiences, you may wish to require authentication to access certain pages. Customize your Power Pages site to meet your organization's unique needs.

Anonymous users

Pages that don't require a sign-in are referred to as anonymous or unauthenticated.

Authenticated users

Authenticated pages allow you to specify the exact data your customer sees or modifies. To make a site Authenticated-only, set page permissions on the home page properties. This setting requires users to register and sign in before seeing content on any page of the site. For more information, see Page permissions.

Any authenticated user on your site is tied to a contact record in Dataverse. Remember, your site authentication doesn't dictate your authorization. Your authentication is simply a digital identifier, which grants access to specific pages.

Access

Many sites today include a sign-in or register experience where users either create a new sign-in profile or use an existing sign-in to access site pages. These sign-in credentials could be tied to their social accounts or their corporate credentials. These credentials are examples of Identity Providers(IdP). Power Pages works with many industry standard Identity Providers.

More information: Overview of authentication in Power Pages)

Internal users

Users within your organization should use Microsoft Entra. Using Microsoft Entra ID provides a seamless sign-in experience via an active session Using Microsoft Entra ID also aids in site security. When a user leaves the organization, their Microsoft Entra account is disabled, and they can no longer access the protected pages on your site. For your convenience, all Power Pages sites come with Microsoft Entra ID preconfigured.

External users

External users should be using an external identity provider. Having a single external identity provider can help onboard users consistently across multiple sites or apps. Your users can access these sites and applications using a single set of credentials for their convenience. Power Pages offers several options.

Azure Active Directory B2C (Azure AD B2C) is one option you might consider for an identity provider. Integrate your custom or corporate identity systems. You can enable the use of existing social accounts like Microsoft Account, LinkedIn, Google, including an option you set to allow a sign-in profile based on an email address.

You can also customize the look and feel to match your needs, see more in: Customize the Azure AD B2C user interface.

Security

Power Pages allows you to create secure sites.

You can protect any page and data on your site. For more information, see Power Pages Security.

You can set table permissions to configure web roles for authenticated and unauthenticated audiences. For more information, see Assign table permissions.

You can allow open registration or use identity providers to validate email addresses. For more information, see Provide access to external audiences.

Data modeling

Use the data workspace to create tables, views, and forms, which are used to create pages with list and form components that allow users to interact directly with data stored in Microsoft Dataverse. You need to configure the appropriate table permissions for users to be able to interact with the data.

Anonymous users data design

You don't need to do anything specific in the data design to grant read access. If you assign global table permissions for the anonymous web role, all the data displays in a list or form when they access the page.

Contextual authentication users data design

Authenticated users on your site are represented by a corresponding contact record once they sign in. There's a native, built-in relationship between the accounts table and each contact record. You can make modifications to this association if you choose. For more information about contextual data security, see Power Pages security.

Recommendations for your first project

Separate development from production

While Power Pages offers the ability to install more than one site in each environment, we recommend creating a separate environment from production to create and test new features. More information: Go live checklist

Conduct user testing

We strongly recommend creating a stable test site for internal stakeholders and early external testers. A test site allows you to fine-tune your development efforts.

Secure a custom domain

Creating a custom domain for your go live is recommended. Reach out to your internal teams to secure one in advance of your go live date.

SSL certificates are required to set up your custom domain. For more information, see Custom Domains.

Use our Go Live Checklist

Use our Go live checklist as guidance to plan for a successful live launch of your site.

See also

Introduction: Planning a Power Apps project