This article is part of a series on creating Portals:

Portals are unified collaboration spaces, where you can share information with your customers and prospects, and they can interact with that data too.

You generate a Portal for each individual Company you would like a Portal for ("Company" being the Planhat model for organizations that are your customers and prospects). Portals can be automatically populated with content from a Portal Template, and you can also manually add content to Portals. Internal and External Users can be automatically added via Portal Templates, and/or you can manually invite Internal and External Users. Additionally, you need to share data records to each Portal.

In this article, we will focus on the process to create ("spin up") a Portal for an individual Company - both manually via a Company Full-Page Profile, and automatically via an Automation. Subsequent articles will take you through the next steps.

Now the Company's Portal has been created, the next step is to share data records to the Portal, which we'll go through in the next article in this series here.

So far in this article, we have gone through the main steps of manually creating a Portal for an individual Company - but it's also possible for Portals to be automatically created for Companies, making it even easier for you to use Portals at scale.

It works via an Automation, with your choice of trigger criteria. Combined with Portal Templates, Portals can be automatically created and populated with content and users as well. As usual, you can manually make changes in individual Portals once they have been created.

At the time of writing, you set this up via a Custom Automation in the App Center. Let's look at an example of this.

Click the image to view it enlarged

The trigger of the Custom Automation can be whatever you want it to be, but it will typically relate to the Company model. For example, it could be when a Company is added to a specific filter (such as "Mid-Market Onboarding") - that's when you want a Portal to be created for that Company. You can read more generally about Custom Automations and triggers here.

Then, you only need one step in the Automation - a "Create Portal" step, as shown in the example screenshots above and below.

The example above makes use of replacement codes (dynamic references). As this Automation will be triggered by an update in a Company record, <<object._id>> refers to this Company record. In the "Owner" field, we can use <<object._owner>> to say that the Owner of the Portal should be the Owner of the Company. If you wanted the Co-Owner of the Company to be the Portal Owner instead, you could just adjust this replacement code.

Instead of using these dynamic replacement codes, you can alternatively click the icon of a circular arrow to switch from text (code) into a dropdown menu where you can choose a specific named Planhat User.

Note that the name of the Portal could be a simple string like in the screenshot above, or you could use a dynamic replacement code in this too - i.e. variable Portal names are supported.

Finally, at the bottom, you can specify colors for Portals created using this Automation. This would override any colors defined in the Portal Template (see next point).

It's important to note that Portals created via an Automation in this way still have Portal Templates applied, in the same way as if you had manually clicked to create a Portal for a Company. Each time a Portal is being created, Planhat will check to see whether the Company matches the criteria of any existing Portal Template(s), and will apply the appropriate Template. Via this, the Portal can be automatically populated with content (Sections/Pages) and users (Internal and External Users). For further details of Portal Templates, see our separate article here.

As we mentioned for manually-created Portals, the next step is to share data records to the Portal, which we'll go through in the next article in this series here.