Building a Modern Customer Portal with Microsoft Power Platform
Driven by a vision to modernize the customer experience, a North American flour milling company partnered with Stoneridge Software to create a more connected, data-driven way to serve customers. While personal relationships with sales representatives remained a cornerstone of their business, leadership envisioned giving customers faster access to the information they rely on, such as contract details, invoices, quality reports, and other critical documents. They wanted to use the Microsoft ecosystem as the foundation for this initiative, ensuring a secure, connected, and scalable approach.
Together with Stoneridge Software, the company turned to the Microsoft Power Platform, leveraging Power Pages as the framework for building a secure and user-friendly customer portal.
Business Challenges – Balancing Relationships and Efficiency
Like many organizations, the company was at a crossroads between maintaining personalized service and streamlining operations:
- Customers frequently contacted sales representatives for basic account information, pulling teams away from strategic initiatives.
- Staff spent hours locating and sending documents for audits and daily operational needs.
- Leadership sought a solution that improved customer access to information without replacing the trusted human connections at the heart of their business.
Recommended Solution – Turning Customer Experience Vision into Reality
The Stoneridge Software team partnered with the client to evaluate how Microsoft tools could best meet their goals. Stoneridge recommended building a customer portal—powered by Power Pages within the Power Platform and integrated across Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain and Azure—as the most effective way to deliver both secure self-service convenience and ongoing personal engagement.
The portal design focused on giving customers a seamless, intuitive experience:
- Centralized access. Customers can securely log in to view contracts, orders, invoices, bills of lading, and certificates of analysis, all in one place.
- Tailored navigation. A role-based landing page ensures the most relevant data is front and center, with quick links to the most commonly used documents.
- Confidence in security. Two-factor authentication powered by Azure AD B2C provides a trusted sign-in process, while document storage in Azure ensures compliance and integrity.
- Connected to Microsoft systems. Data is synchronized in real time with Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations and Dataverse, and select SharePoint documents are displayed in an organized view.
- Personal connections preserved. Each site includes mill-specific contact details and a feedback feature, ensuring direct relationships remain visible and accessible.
By blending the Power Platform’s flexibility with enterprise-grade Microsoft security, the portal allowed the client to achieve their vision of a modern, scalable solution that supports both efficiency and customer relationships.
Results – A Smarter, Stronger Way to Serve Customers
The project delivered tangible benefits to both customers and staff:
- Sales teams gained back valuable time as routine requests shifted to the portal.
- Customers gained confidence with a “one-stop shop” for fast, reliable access to information.
- The Microsoft framework ensured security, compliance, and scalability to support future enhancements.
- The business strengthened its reputation for being both service-oriented and forward-thinking.
“This project exemplifies how Microsoft technologies can come together to create tangible business value,” said a Stoneridge Software representative. “Our partnership with the client was focused on building not just a solution, but a foundation for growth and scalability.”
Technologies Used
- Power Pages – Framework for the portal, including a custom landing page, quick links, and enhanced UI/UX features.
- Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain – Source of sales, order, and document data, with custom development to upload PDFs to Azure Blob Storage.
- Microsoft Dataverse – Custom tables storing synchronized data from Dynamics 365 for portal display.
- Azure Active Directory B2C – Provides secure authentication with multi-factor authentication enabled.
- Azure Blob Storage – Stores sales-related PDF documents for secure download from the portal.
- SharePoint – Stores supplementary documents, selectively displayed in the portal in an organized format.
- Dual Write – Real-time synchronization of data between Finance & Operations and Dataverse.
