With Planhat, all your data is compiled in one place, so you can get a complete understanding of your customers/prospects.

While this in itself is super useful, simply having a lot of data in one place is not enough, as it could potentially be overwhelming. Other customer platforms can feel a bit like you're trying to make your way through a dense jungle - it's really hard to find the right path through all the distractions.

Fortunately, upgraded Planhat (ws.planhat.com) can be highly personalized, so each Planhat User sees exactly what they need to see, and without the clutter of elements that aren't relevant. It's quicker, easier, and less frustrating than fighting through that jungle.

From the perspective of an Admin (e.g. CS Ops) managing Planhat for their team, there are additional advantages to this customization. For example, data security is important for any business. You'll want to ensure that people don't have unnecessary access to customer data. And similarly, you'll likely want to restrict access to certain features - so not every single Planhat User can modify your whole Planhat tenant (e.g. change security settings, or add/delete fields, or modify tenant email settings, etc.). This helps you keep control over your tenant, and prevent unintended consequences of untrained people accidentally making widespread changes.

As an Admin within Planhat, it's straightforward for you to guide Users by customizing their User Interface (UI), and to give them the exact access they need but no more. You do this via Home Templates and Roles. You apply these recommendations/permissions to groups of Users (e.g. Sales), rather than having to set them from scratch for each individual User. Both Home Templates and Roles are a little like the concepts of "profiles" and "permission sets" you may be familiar with from other tools.

Home Templates relate to the content displayed in the Planhat User Interface (UI).

As an Admin, Home Templates are how you can customize the "Home" of your Users from a "top down" perspective. (This is in addition to the "bottom up" customization they can carry out themselves.) You can do this by:

As a reminder, Sections are like folders for your Views/Pages. If you would like to read up on the definitions of these terms, you can check out our separate article here.

The screenshot below shows an example of a Section in a Home that has been pinned as part of a Home Template.

Home Templates are ways in which you, as a Planhat Admin (e.g. CS Ops), can guide your team. They enable you to efficiently set up the Home screens of new members of your organization, while still allowing them a degree of autonomy. This means they can get up and running quickly, as they have easy access to all the Pages/Sections most relevant to them.

You'll typically create Home Templates for different departments or jobs - think about which teams you have within your business, who are using Planhat. For example:

But note that you only need to create multiple different Home Templates if you want to automatically customize their Homes in different ways. If you'll have the same pinned/recommended Sections for multiple teams, then you don't need to set up separate Home Templates for each of them. Note that there are other ways in which you can share content (Sections/Pages) between Users, and Users can customize their own Home to an extent. Therefore, you'll likely have around 1-5 Home Templates, depending on your business size/complexity.

As an Admin, you create, edit and view Home Templates within "Content" (also called "Content Manager"), which is one of the Global Tools for Admins that you access at the left of your top gray bar, either via the ellipsis symbol, or by clicking on the Content icon if you have pinned it.

Click on the name of an existing Home Templates to view or edit it, or click "+ New Home Template" to create a new one.

In the first tab of the form - "Criteria" (shown in the screenshot below) - you can define a rule ("Match Conditions") to automatically apply this Home Template to Users. For example, you could set this based on the Role assigned to that User, or the Team they are in. This makes it easy to bulk-apply a Home Template to a group of Users, rather than needing to assign each individual User.

In the "Criteria" tab, you can also view which Users this Home Template is applied to. Use the "Find in list..." search box to quickly jump to a particular User.

In the next tab - "Sections" (shown below) - you can configure the Home screen of Users.

The section at the top of this tab is "Pinned to Homes". You can put your mouse over the "i" to see a tooltip explanation: "These Sections will always show at the top of the Home of matching Users, and can't be hidden [by those Users]. Ensure the Sections have the right permissions." Here you can select the most important Section(s) for this group of Users. Remember, we showed an example of what a pinned Section in a Home looks like earlier in this article.

Underneath this, you'll see "Shared at first Home set-up". Again, you can put your mouse over the "i" to see a tooltip explanation: "These Sections will be shared at User's first Home set-up and can thereafter be hidden by the User if they want. They will always appear under "Recommended from team" in the Content Explorer." This is a way you can recommend Sections to Users. As the tooltip explains, these suggestions will be shown to them when they first log in, and then they can choose whether or not to have these Sections in their Homes; if they decline, they can still access them (e.g. add them to Home later on) via the Content Explorer.

The third and final tab within Home Templates is "Pages":

Once again, there's a tooltip (via the "i") if you need to quickly check its definition within the app: "These Pages will show up under "Recommended from team" in the Content Explorer for the matching Users. We suggest putting some of the core documents here, whether central reports or best-practice views for work." This part of Home Templates doesn't directly affect the Homes of Users, but is another way you can provide guidance - and a User can easily add these Pages to their Home via the Content Explorer.

Here's an example of Content Explorer, with Pages in "Recommended from team".

Click the image to view it enlarged

Roles are similar to Home Templates, in that you apply them to groups of Planhat Users (your colleagues) to customize your Planhat tenant for them.

However, with Roles, you configure the access level for Users - what they can see, what they can edit, and so on. This is related to data security, permissions and features; whereas, Home Templates are focused on content recommendations.

There are three main parts of Roles:

There is also a related concept of Teams. Teams allow you to group your choice of Users into teams based on job role (e.g. CSM team) or location (e.g. Australia team), etc. Once created, you have the option to refer to Teams when configuring portfolio permissions in Roles, you could use the Team in a rule to apply Home Templates, and also you can use this property in filters elsewhere in Planhat.

Roles are important for security and control within your Planhat tenant. It's unlikely that you'll want every single Planhat User to be able to see and do everything in Planhat, with full access to all customer data and all features/settings. Using Roles, you can easily give groups of Users the permissions relevant to them but no more, so there isn't a risk of them accidentally (or maliciously) making unwanted changes in your tenant.

Like Home Templates, Roles are also useful to streamline a User's UI in Planhat, so their screen is not cluttered with elements not relevant to them.

And similar to Home Templates, Roles are often created for specific departments or jobs. You'll typically have Roles such as:

Roles allow you to control access within Planhat down to a really granular level.

In upgraded Planhat (ws.planhat.com), Roles are part of "Settings", which is one of the Global Tools for Admins that you access at the left of your top gray bar, either via the ellipsis symbol, or by clicking on the Settings icon if you have pinned it.

As you can see in the screenshot above, just above where you configure Roles are the places where you add and manage Users and Teams in upgraded Planhat.

After clicking into "Roles" within Settings, to add a new Role you click on the "person plus" button shown below.

If you click on a specific Role (e.g. "Administrator" or "CSM"), you'll see its permissions on the right. The "Portfolio permission" is at the top of the screen, and then you'll see tabs for "Data model" and "Workflow" permissions underneath that.

For further information on the different permissions you can set within a Role, you can check out our series of articles on permissions for upgraded Planhat here.

You can also read our article about configuring Teams here. Note that this referenced Team article was written for the previous version of Planhat (app.planhat.com), so some elements are slightly out of date, but the principles are the same between the two platforms. That article will be updated for upgraded Planhat (ws.planhat.com) in future.