Content (Sections/Pages) is what your End Users will see and interact with in Portals. As you'll have Portals for a large number of Companies (customers/prospects), it would take some time to manually create them all completely from scratch. Fortunately, you can be more efficient by using Portal Templates.

With Portal Templates, you can configure content for specific groups of Companies - e.g. you could have a "Digital Sales Room" Portal Template for Companies that are listed as prospects, and a "Partner Portal" Template for Companies marked as partners. The applicable Portal Template will be automatically applied each time you create (generate / "spin up") a Portal for a specific Company, automatically adding the appropriate content, and minimizing the amount of work you need to do manually. The relevant Portal Template is identified via criteria that you set.

Even when a Portal Template has been applied, you can still create/edit content directly in an individual Portal for a specific Company - meaning you can customize and personalize each Portal as required. This gives you the best of both worlds in terms of pre-configuring to save time, yet being able to tailor Portals to suit each situation.

Creating Portal Templates for groups of Companies is an example of "top down" customization, carried out by you as a Planhat admin; and then creating and customizing individual Portals for specific Companies can be done by general users (e.g. CSMs and Salespeople), and is an example of "bottom up" customization.

To summarize the overall process of creating Portals, it's recommended that you:

When designing Portal Templates, there are three main categories of Pages:

In this article, we will take you through how to create and manage Portal Templates.

Portal Templates are configured within the "Portal Manager" Global Tool for admins.

Firstly, go to the Portal Manager by clicking on your tenant name or icon in the top left of Planhat, and selecting "Portal Manager" from the "System Admin" list.

Once in Portal Manager, click on the "Templates" tab on the left-hand side.

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This will display a list of all your current Portal Templates.

To create a new Portal Template, within the "Templates" part of the Portal Manager, begin by clicking on the orange "+ New Portal Template" button in the top right.

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This will open up a new modal with 5 tabs, which we will go through in turn in this article.

At the top of all the tabs (so you can set it in any), you will see a "Template name" box, where you should add in a clear name for your Portal Template, such as "Customer Portal", "Partner Portal" or "Digital Sales Room" etc.

Under "Match Conditions", you can set a rule/filter to define which types of Companies this Portal Template applies to (e.g. "Customer Status is equal to prospect", as shown in the screenshot below). You can read more about designing rules/filters here.

If you don't set criteria (a filter) here, then your Portal Template will theoretically match all Companies.

When you have multiple Portal Templates that could theoretically match a Company, only one Portal Template will be applied. We will start at the top of the list of Portal Templates and apply the first Template that matches - similar to how Profiles and Health Profiles (Health Scores) are applied. This means that the order of Portal Templates makes a difference. (You can drag and drop Templates to the correct position, by clicking on the symbol of 6 dots.)

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In the "Access" tab, you define who can access Portals built from this Template.

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are two main elements to this:

Here you can define which team members (you and your colleagues) will automatically be given access when a Portal is created using this Template. The Planhat User who actually creates (generates / "spins up") the Portal for an individual Company is automatically the "Owner" of that Portal, in addition to the access given via the Portal Template.

So, for example, if I (Carly) create a Portal from this Portal Template ...

... then the access for Internal Users automatically given will be as follows:

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Within individual Portals, you can further edit the access for Internal Users, as we detail in a separate article here.

So how do you set the default Internal User (also called Internal Team Member) access within a Portal Template?

You simply use the dropdown to select the Users, or groups of Users, and the appropriate access level (e.g. whether they should be an Editor).

Here you can define which End Users (your customers/prospects) will automatically be given access when a Portal is created using this Template. (Of course, only End Users belonging to the Company the Portal is for could be added.)

Immediately under where you set the default sharing/access for Internal Users (you and your team members), you have another dropdown menu where you can configure this for External Users (your End Users).

It wouldn't make sense to specify individual named End Users here (like we saw for Internal Users), because each End User belongs to a specific Company, while Portal Templates will be used for multiple different Companies. Instead, the options in the dropdown menu correspond to your End User Global Filters as created in the "Data Model" Global Tool (organized by label) - e.g. "All End Users with email address" or "Main Users" etc. Using Global Filters in this way is a quick and easy way to specify a particular group of End Users (e.g. Admins or CS Ops).

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End Users that match the filter in the Portal Template are automatically added to their Company's new Portal as External Users.

For example:

The other important point to note is that once you select a filter here (as opposed to leaving it on "No End Users" ("-"), you will see a toggle switch appear where you can choose whether those End Users are added to the new Portal as inactive or active External Users. The toggle switch will start as disabled (shown below - it's in the top right of the green box), and you can choose to enable it if you would like to automatically activate these External Users.

This is the difference you'll see for the External Users in Portals (shown in screenshots below): External Users either not active or active. If External Users are added inactive, you can manually enable the "Active" toggle for each External User within the relevant Portal. Activated External Users have access to log into the Portal.

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In the "Sections" tab, you start defining the actual content in the Portal Template.

Taking the example of the Portal Template shown in the screenshot above, a Portal created from this Template will have this Section automatically preloaded:

Configuring content in Portal Templates is similar to specifying content in Home Templates.

In both parts ("Pinned to Portals" and "Shared at first Portal set-up" - defined in the gray callout box above), you click on the big "+", and you will see available Sections to be able to choose from - these correspond to the Sections you have in the "Content" part of Portal Manager, as shown in the screenshots below.

When you select an existing Section and it loads up here, it will display the Pages within that Section.

Existing Sections you select in a Portal Template will be mirrored across each Company Portal created from this Portal Template. This means they aren't then edited per Company Portal. You can see this denoted by the word "Add" (rather than "Duplicate") shown to the right of each Page name; this is grayed out because it's not changeable in this case. This is the perfect setup for content that is standard for multiple Companies rather than being Company-specific - e.g. introductory enablement resources about your product.

You also have the option of creating a new custom Template Section and specifying each of its Pages to be either "Added" or "Duplicated" - we go through this next.

In addition, for the "Shared at first Portal set-up" box at the bottom, there is an alternative option: "+ Create Template Section".

Clicking on "+ Create Template Section", you will be prompted to create a brand new Section here for this specific Portal Template, rather than selecting a Section that has already been created. Each Portal created from this Portal Template will have its own copy of this custom Section built from the Template, unique to that Portal - this means you can edit the Section within an individual Company Portal (e.g. add an extra Page there), without affecting other Portals with that Portal Template.

Give your new Section a name (and note you can modify the shape/color of its icon too), and then you'll see the Section load in the Template with 0 Pages.

Click "+ Add Page" to see your list of available Pages - and Workflow Templates - to add to your new Portal Section. Repeat this for each Page (or Workflow Template) you would like to add. See notes below regarding which Pages and Workflow Templates you can choose from here.

For each Page in the Section, you can decide to "Add" (mirror) or "Duplicate" (copy) it in each Portal. Duplicated Pages will be specific to the Portal/Company, so you can customize them as needed in each Portal - e.g. make changes to text within a Document Page. You can have a mix of "Added" (mirrored) and "Duplicated" (copied) Pages within a Section. For example, you might have a Page of resources that will be identical in each Portal (not edited), plus a Page that's a meeting-notes template that will be filled in for the relevant Company in each Portal (i.e. edited).

You can use the symbols of 6 dots to the left of the Page/Template names to drag and drop them if you want to change their order within the Section.

You can select from Pages that have been shared to Portals.

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The Workflow Templates available to select here are those that have been shared to Portals (in the Portal Manager), as pictured below.

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Note that this is only possible for Workflow Templates that are Projects (rather than Sequences) and built on the Company model (as opposed to End User or other models).

Like we've just seen for Sections, this tab affects which content is in the Portal Template, similar to configuring Home Templates.

These Pages will show as "verified" when adding content in applicable Portals (see screenshots below). They won't appear in a Portal until manually added, so we recommend that you add a Page to a pinned Section if it's required for the Portal.

As you've just seen for Sections, to add content here, you click on the "+" to see a dropdown of applicable Pages to select from.

The final tab in the "Add Portal Template" modal is "Branding". This is where you can set the colors for the Portal Template, so your Portal's appearance is aligned with your organization's branding.

When a Portal is created using this Portal Template, these colors will be automatically applied - although it is possible to customize them in an individual Portal via its "Portal Settings".

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Once you've finished configuring your Portal Template, click on the orange "Save" button in the top right. (You will need to enter a name for your Portal Template in order to enable this button.)

To edit an existing Portal Template, click in its row in the table (e.g. on its name) to open up its configuration modal.

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To delete an existing Portal Template, click on it in the list to open up its configuration panel (as described above), but then click on the ellipsis (symbol of 3 dots) next to the "Save" button in the top right, and select "Delete".

To reorder Portal Templates in the list (because if a Company matches the criteria of multiple Portal Templates, then the closest one to the top is the one that's applied, as we mentioned earlier in this article), you can drag and drop a Portal Template by clicking on the symbol of 6 dots and holding, moving the Template, and then releasing.

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