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 as 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 two 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).

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 named End Users here, 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 Global Filters as created in the "Data Model" Global Tool (organized by label). 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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Here you start defining the actual content in the Portal Template.

For instance, taking the example of the Portal Template shown in the screenshot above, a Portal created from this Template will have these Sections automatically preloaded:

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

For each of the box headings ("Pinned to Portals" and "Shared at first Portal set-up"), 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.

These Sections are added on Portal creation, are fixed to the top of the Portal sidebar, and can't be removed by users.

These Sections will be added on Portal creation, but can be removed by users.

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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