DotNetNuke:
This is a widely used Open source framework available to develop websites without requiring much technical knowledge. Its framework provides for developing custom modules that can integrate seamlessly with the main DNN website. DNN also takes care of security by providing website owners to provide access to different sets of users to different functionalities on the portal.
Self Service Portal:
Any self service portal (in our case Inogic has a product for Self Service portal/Customer Portal) to allow CRM users to allow their customers to register tickets through the Portal and monitor its progress online. These customers use the portal to register incidents that are directly created in CRM and any updates by the company on their case is reflected to them through the portal.
Linking the two:
We need to create a DNN module for our Self Service Portal that can be installed within DNN. DNN uses the concept of User Controls. We needed to convert each of the web forms that we had to user controls.
Once they were converted to User controls you can add these Controls to DNN and associate it with your module. Once the controls have been uploaded, user can use these controls to add on their pages as and where they wish. can include these in your DNN module. These controls can then be used by end users to add on the pages they wish.
The Self Service Portal had its inbuilt security that was integrated with CRM by adding custom attributes to store the login id and password of the customers. This was taken care of in DNN module by using the DNN security. So only users that are registered on the DNN site had access to the Portal. We could well do away with this security check from CRM as DNN already has a robust security architecture.
Advantages of linking:
A customer centric website can be designed using DNN by the users easily while also utilizing the entire features of CRM's customer service portal.
