Summary
Step 1: in your Planhat tenant, open the Project Workflow, click on the ellipsis symbol, and select "Share on Portal"
Step 2: in the relevant Company's Portal, add a "Workflow 360" Page to a Section and select the shared Workflow
You also need to ensure that the relevant task steps have been individually shared to the Portal
External Role permissions also control which elements of Workflows your External Users can see
It is possible to automate the process of adding a Workflow to a Portal by including a Workflow Template in a Portal Template, which we describe in our next article
Who is this article for?
Planhat users setting up Portals for individual Companies
Planhat users configuring Planhat for their organization (e.g. CS Ops)
Series
After reading this article, we suggest you read "Advanced setup for Workflows in Portals"
See also our wider series on Portals here ...
... and our series on Workflows here
Article contents
Introduction
Planhat Portals are the perfect way for you to collaborate with your prospects and customers ("Companies" in Planhat's data model structure), sharing information and working together to achieve goals.
Workflows (previously called Playbooks) are structured series of steps, which are pre-configured but customizable. The main types of Workflows are:
Projects - with mainly task steps, e.g. "complete X in the product", or "hold training meeting"
Sequences - mainly automated emails sent to End Users, e.g. "welcome to Y product"
As well as other types of Pages (e.g. Data Tables, Dashboards and Documents), you can include Workflows in Portals as "Workflow 360" Pages. This applies specifically to Projects built for the Company model.
Each individual Portal belongs to one specific Company. A common scenario is sharing an Onboarding Workflow to Company Z's Portal, including task steps for them to complete and also for you to complete together, so they can keep track of the process and see what they need to do.
You have granular control of which Workflows you share to Portals; and then even within that, you choose which task steps to share, meaning you can have internal task steps within a Workflow that you don't share, and external task steps for a customer/prospect to see that you do share. Plus, you can configure permissions so that you share specific columns (fields) to External Users, while keeping others private.
Task steps have "owners" (who are responsible for those steps), and these can either be "External Users" (End Users in Portals) or "Internal Users" (Users / Team Members in Portals - i.e. you and your co-workers).
📌 Important to note
It is possible to automate some aspects of this process - you can even configure Planhat so that when you create a Portal for a Company, it automatically adds a specific Workflow (from a particular Workflow Template) to that Portal, creates External Users and then assigns the relevant External Users as owners of the relevant steps. We cover this in a separate article (here), but firstly in this article we'll go through the more simple principles of manually adding a Workflow to a Portal.
Step 1: sharing a Workflow to a Portal - making it available to add
🚀 Tip
If the Workflow in question has been created from a Workflow Template that's shared to Portals, then this Workflow should already be available for Portals (shown by the purple "On Portal" badge), so you can skip this step.
To add a specific Workflow to a Portal (e.g. to add an SMB Onboarding Project associated with the Company "Zoom" to Zoom's Portal), the first step is to make it available for selection in that Company's Portal. This process is simple.
Open up your chosen Workflow within your Planhat tenant
For example, you could go to the Company's Full-Page Profile and open up the Workflow there
Or, you may be viewing a table of Workflows in the Data Explorer or a Page, where you click on the Workflow in question to show its details
Click the image to view it enlarged
Click on the ellipsis symbol (3 dots) in the top right of the Workflow, and select "Share on Portal"
Click "Share" on the modal (shown below) to confirm
You will note that the Workflow now has a purple badge stating "On Portal".
🚀 Tip
Doing this itself does not actually add the Workflow to a Portal - next in the article we will talk you through how to do this
You can even carry out this step (making the Workflow available to Portals) before the Company's Portal actually exists
Step 2: actually adding a Workflow to a Portal
Now the Workflow is available to add to that Company's Portal, let's actually add it to the Portal. You choose where the Workflow is positioned within the Portal.
Firstly, make sure the Company has a Portal. If it doesn't yet, follow the instructions in our separate article here
Looking in the Portal itself, you will see that the Workflow is not present yet. You will be adding the Workflow via a "Workflow 360" Page. Like other Pages in a Portal, this Page will be part of a Section. Choose which Section you would like the Workflow 360 Page to be part of - this might be a Section that's already present, or you may want to create a new Section for this. (You can read more about Portal content - Sections and Pages - here)
Go to add a Page in your Portal (in your chosen Section), and select "Workflow 360" as the Page type
Type in a name for your new Page, and confirm its access/permissions
Select your Workflow from the list. (Workflows for this Company that have been shared to the Portal - as you did in Step 1 - will be available here)
You will see that the Workflow is now added to the Portal
Click the image to view it enlarged
Sharing individual Workflow task steps to a Portal
Can't see steps in the Workflow in the Portal?
It's important to note that each individual task step within a Project Workflow needs to be shared to the Portal too - it's not enough to simply add the Portal (as described above) if the steps haven't also been shared. If you have followed the instructions and added a Workflow to a Portal but can't see some or all of the steps you were expecting, then this is likely to be why.
Click the image to view it enlarged
Why do steps need to be shared individually?
This granular control is actually really useful, as it means that you can share some steps with your customer/prospect in the Portal (external task steps - tasks for them to do, or for you to do with them), while keeping other tasks in the same Workflow private to your and your co-workers to follow them within your Planhat tenant (internal task steps - tasks for you to do within your team). For example:
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It's important to note that this can be set on the Workflow Template level, meaning you don't normally need to edit this for each individual Workflow, as Workflows created from that Workflow Template will follow that pattern.
How to share steps individually
If a task step is not showing in its Workflow in the Portal, but you want it to be visible to your Portal, it's really simple - when looking at the Workflow within your Planhat tenant, just click on the "Shared in Portal" toggle switch on that row in the table. Orange means that it's shared to the Portal.
🚀 Tips
You may need to refresh the browser window showing your Portal to get the extra task steps to show up after you shared them
Remember, although here we are talking about editing an individual Workflow, usually task step sharing is already configured for you within the Workflow Template
Viewing task steps in a Workflow in a Portal - External User permissions
As well as sharing the Workflow and its steps to a Portal, the other important factor to consider is External Role permissions.
📌 Reminder - definitions
External Users are End Users (people who are your customers/prospects) who have been added to a Portal
External Roles determine the permissions of those External Users
They are the equivalent to the standard Roles applied to Users (i.e. you and your co-workers) within your Planhat tenant
You can read more about External Roles here
For your External Users to be able to see the relevant task steps and step columns (task fields) within a Workflow in a Portal, they need to have the necessary data model permissions enabled within their External Roles.
Note that External Roles are defined in the Portal Manager for your whole tenant in general, rather than something set per Portal.
Within External Roles, there are data model permissions (and associated field/property permissions) for both "Workflow" and "Task".
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Remember that you can click on each model to open up the property/field permissions nested underneath.
One important permission that can be accidentally overlooked is the "View" permission for the "Groups" property on the "Workflow" model - note that this needs to be enabled in order to see tasks within Workflows, as they are organized in groups (e.g. "Account Review", "Customer Call" and "Contracting" in the next screenshot below).
To control which Task fields (Workflow columns) are shown to External Users in shared Workflows, you also use External Role data model permissions.
An External User will see whichever fields/columns are defined in the Workflow Template, as long as their External Role has sufficient data model permissions, which we describe below:
The External User's External Role needs to have "View" access to the property/field "Template" on the Workflow data model, to see those columns/fields
The External User's External Role needs to have "View" access to any Task data model properties/fields that are used in the Workflow Template, to see those columns/fields
If the External User's External Role didn't have these permissions enabled, then they would only see a few minimum fields/columns as default (and would need to manually add fields/columns to the view every time, because External Users don't have saved column preferences).
In addition, ensure you enable permissions so that your External Users can view task owners (rather than them seeing "No one") - we take you through this below.
To view the names of Internal Users (Planhat Users - you and your co-workers), the "View" permission for the "Nickname" field/property of the "User" model (within the "business models" category of data model permissions) should be enabled
To view the names of External Users (End Users - your customers/prospects), the "View" permission for the "Nickname" field/property of the "External User" model (within the "system models" category of data model permissions) should be enabled
So with both of these permissions enabled, all the names are shown:
To check what an External User can see in a Portal, you can impersonate them.
If you want to confirm you have enabled all the necessary permissions for an External User to see all the elements of a Workflow in their Portal, it's easy to check what they can see:
Go to the Portal for that Company
Click on "Portal Settings" in the bottom left
Ensure you are in the "General" tab - you will see "Impersonation" at the bottom
Select your choice of External User from the dropdown menu
Click "View Portal"
Interacting with a Workflow in a Portal
Now that your Workflow is in a Portal, both you and the Portal's External Users can interact with it.
For example, you could select an External User to be the owner of a specific task step (e.g. a task to configure something in their copy of your product), and then that External User can themselves mark the step as completed once they have done the task.
Creating a Portal that's automatically populated with a Workflow (including External User task owners)
In this article, we have discussed manually adding a Workflow to a Portal, but it's also possible to automate this process in Planhat.
You would do this by including a Workflow Template within a Portal Template, and creating a Portal using that Portal Template.
This can even include automatically assigning External Users as task step owners within the Workflow. This is done by specifying in the Portal Template which End Users should be created as External Users, and using a custom "End User" type field (on the Company model) as the task step owner in the Workflow Template.
We talk you through this process in more detail in our separate article here.