Even major, enterprise-level businesses build, manage and update their content on their own CMS in this day and age. A CMS (content management solution) was the industry’s answer to eliminating development overhead. By creating a solution that allowed non-developers to quickly churn out quality content, several companies have garnered quite a loyalty. Drupal, WordPress, Magento, Joomla, to name a few, are CMSs trusted by multi-million dollar businesses when it comes to storing their content.

Companies have also found versatility through the use of third-party applications or custom applications. The more popular the CMS, the larger the array of available applications, rendering the CMS even more functional. This makes it difficult for new platforms to penetrate the digital marketing realm with suave, like Microsoft has with Dynamics 365 for Marketing.

Dynamics 365 for Marketing comes equipped with several noteworthy features that drive customer engagement. Users can create landing pages to spotlight events, manage subscription centers that allow for email preferences, create online forms, and more. Here’s where it gets tricky for some- Interactive features mean interaction and interactions mean data, since the user is submitting info to and receiving info from Dynamics 365 for Marketing. With data comes the topic of portals…

Having read the above, you may have a better understanding of what “bucket” you belong in. Do you belong to ‘Scenario A: My site is strictly informational and we don’t have someone in house to manage it’ or ‘Scenario B: Our website is built on a CMS and we have the in-house team available to edit pages’?

A Scenario A business would most likely be advised to run on a Dynamics 365 Portal. Scenario B business could benefit from Dynamics 365 Portals but could get away with just embedding forms directly into their pages in their CMS. We’ll tap more into what Dynamics 365 Portals actually represent in terms of value, and how they’re applicable to different businesses. Let’s start with a brief Overview of Dynamics 365 Portals.