Preventing users from seeing the Search feature in Dynamics Portals

In every Dynamics Portals project I've worked on customers will always ask "Can the search in portals find results in custom entities?" The search feature of Dynamics Portals unfortunately does not allow custom entities to be enabled (yet).

Refer to Colin Vermander's answer in this Dynamics Community Forum post.
Colin's suggestion is to vote for it on the Microsoft Ideas site: Ability to search custom entities in Portals. Please vote :) Thank you.

The next question I get asked is "Can we prevent users in seeing it then?"
Yes, this can be done and I can help with this. Check out my vlog below.

Steps

There is no code required to prevents users in seeing the search feature in Dynamics Portals. You don't need to fiddle with the .css or use JavaScript. It's a matter of clicks. 

Update a Site Setting record

In Dynamics 365, navigate to Site Settings and open the "Search/Enabled" record.

Update the Value field from "true" to "false." Save and close the Site Setting.

Browse to your Dynamics Portals and hit the refresh button. You'll now see that the search feature no longer appears.

Summary

By updating the Site Setting record, the search feature will no longer display in Dynamics Portals. It's done in a few clicks without the need for code.

Till next time.