Portals App and Azure Marketplace_

[mobicycle]

Portals apps seem to be designed for AppSource.

What about Azure Marketplace? If you build a prototype app in Portals and then want to publish the app to Azure Marketplace, what are the best practices for doing so?

I found this article but it was published several months ago so may be outdated

https://swimburger.net/blog/dynamics/how-to-deploy-power-apps-portals-using-azure-pipelines

[OliverRodrigues]

Hi @mobicycle 

The article https://swimburger.net/blog/dynamics/how-to-deploy-power-apps-portals-using-azure-pipelines is more related to perform a deployment of the Portals using CI/CD concepts.

It's true that Power Apps (Canvas Apps / PCFs) were very much designed with a Markplace strategy, meaning anyone can develop a component or accelerator and make that available via AppSource

Power Apps Portals however doesn't follow the same design, so the short answer here is no, you can't publish a Portals prototype to the Marketplace

[mobicycle]

I have not looked at Azure Marketplace deeply for a couple of years.

It seems what I need is to fill out forms and provide a webhook. Would my Portals app automatically have a web hook? How would I create one for my Portals app? 

If I can not get a webhook for my Portals app, I assume I could use a CI/CD pipeline to connect to Cloudflare or Bitbucket or similar to get a webhook.

Portals costs $200 usd per month for user login functionality (first 200 users). I would like to use OAuth on Azure Marketplace.

[OliverRodrigues]

Hi, do you need to use web hooks for authentication or would it be something more specific?

Portals provides with plenty of authentication options: Overview of authentication in Power Apps portals - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs

It is recommended to use Azure AD B2C as identity provider.

Do you have an estimate of how many users would be logging in per month? There are tiers so it gets a bit cheaper once you have a large number of logins

[mobicycle]

Using Azure Marketplace would require $0 in monthly authentication costs. Portals starts at $200 per month. I would prefer to go with the $0 per month option.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/plan-saas-offer

The Get it now (Free), Free trial, and Sell through Microsoft listing options have the following technical requirements:

• You must enable both Microsoft Accounts (MSA) and Azure Active Directory for authenticating buyers on your site. You must let buyers with an Azure AD account sign in to your application using Azure AD with single sign-on (SSO).

These additional technical requirements apply to the Sell through Microsoft(transactable) listing option only:

• You must use the SaaS Fulfillment APIs to integrate with Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource. You must expose a service that can interact with the SaaS subscription to create, update, and delete a user account and service plan. Critical API changes must be supported within 24 hours. Non-critical API changes will be released periodically. Diagrams and detailed explanations describing the usage of the collected fields are available in documentation for the APIs.

Implementing a webhook on the SaaS service

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/partner-center-portal/pc-saas-fulfillment-webhook

When creating a transactable SaaS offer in Partner Center, the partner provides the Connection webhook URL to be used as an HTTP endpoint. This webhook is called by Microsoft by using the POST HTTP call

The publisher must implement a webhook in the SaaS service to keep the SaaS subscription status consistent with the Microsoft side. The SaaS service is required to call the Get Operation API to validate and authorize the webhook call and payload data before taking action based on the webhook notification. The publisher should return HTTP 200 to Microsoft as soon as the webhook call is processed. This value acknowledges that the webhook call has been received successfully by the publisher.

"Azure customers can discover and deploy Azure Marketplace solutions through the Create a resource option in the Azure portal. This option opens Azure Marketplace within the Azure portal, where they can search for solutions by name or by category."

Azure Marketplace listing guidelines

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/marketplace-criteria-content-validation

SaaS application requirements

Technical information: Configuration

• For software as a service (SaaS) apps, choose whether you want only to list your app or to enable customers to purchase your app through Azure.
• Select the text that you want on your offer's acquisition button: Free, Free Trial, or Contact Me.
• In the pop-up window, select only one applicable product if your app utilizes the technology: Cortana Intelligence, Power BI Solution Templates, or Power Apps.

[OliverRodrigues]

"

Using Azure Marketplace would require $0 in monthly authentication costs. Portals starts at $200 per month. I would prefer to go with the $0 per month option.

"

Well.. they are different things.. the Portals has a cost on its own to maintain the product and infrastructure. The price is calculated by login or page views. The cost here is not with regards the Portals authentication/login, the cost is to use the Portals itself.

[mobicycle]

I am looking at the total cost of ownership of Portals with AppSource versus Azure Marketplace.

Portals charges $20 per month for unlimited apps, which is good, but the starting price for authentication of $200 per month quickly makes it a less attractive option.

Are you saying Portals apps are not meant for either AppSource or Azure Marketplace? Or just not for Azure Marketplace?

Thanks

[OliverRodrigues]

A few things here:

• You can use Power Apps for $20/month per user and build unlimited apps
• On top of that, Power Apps Portals have its own licensing costs, charged by login or page views 
• Power Apps Portals doesn't work with AppSource, this is more related to CanvasApps/PCF controls
• Power Apps Portals doesn't work with Azure Marketplace
• Power Apps Portals are great when you already have D365/Dataverse (or are planning to use the platform), and want to make the data available externally

Please also take a look at these quick tips for when to use Power Apps Portals

Power Apps Portals Tip #120 - When To Use Power Apps Portals - Engineered Code - YouTube

Power Apps Portals Tip #119 When Not To Use Power Apps Portals Engineered Code - YouTube

[mobicycle]

When you say "doesn't work with" what do you mean?

What is the purpose of being an ISV if you can't use portal apps?

What is the purpose of providing a custom domain for portal apps if you can't sell via either marketplace?

That doesn't add up.

[OliverRodrigues]

• When you say "doesn't work with" what do you mean?
  • you can't publish a Portals within App Source / Azure Marketplace, that's not how it was designed for
• What is the purpose of being an ISV if you can't use portal apps?
  • Portals aren't ready for ISV, Portals is not the same as Canvas Apps.. I haven't heard anything from Microsoft saying that the Portals is going to that direction, so I am not sure it will ever be
• What is the purpose of providing a custom domain for portal apps if you can't sell via either marketplace?
  • The purpose of adding a custom domain is for you to instead of having your URL as contoso.powerappsportals.com, you would have contoso.com Add a custom domain name - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs