Portals are collaborative spaces where you share information and work together with your customers and prospects, each Portal belonging to a specific "Company" in Planhat data model terms.

Workflows are processes you configure in Planhat, such as a "Project" type Workflow on the Company model for Enterprise Onboarding, comprising a series of scheduled task steps (e.g. "Hold kick-off call"). Each Workflow record is associated with a particular Company, while Workflow Templates (described next) contain the templated configuration used to create them.

You set up Workflow Templates that each include steps for that process, including rules to define when each step is scheduled (e.g. step 1 should be due 2 days after the Workflow Template is applied to a Company, creating a new Workflow record; and step 2 should be due 5 days after step 1 is marked as completed; and so on).

In a previous article (here), we talked through how you can manually add a Project-type Workflow record belonging to a Company to that Company's Portal, in two main steps:

We also discussed how:

In this article, we'll go through some additional features that enable you to automate the process of including Workflows in Portals:

Rather than sharing each individual Workflow record (each belonging to a specific Company) to Portals, you can save time and reduce manual work by sharing a Workflow Template to Portals.

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This means that each Workflow (for an individual Company) that's created from that Workflow Template will automatically be shared to Portals too.

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It's important to note that this by itself does not add Workflows into Portals; it actually means they are available for selection in Portals. You would then need to either:

Note also that sharing a Workflow Template to Portals is required for you to be able to dynamically populate its task owners with External Users, which we discuss later in this article.

To share a Workflow Template to Portals:

Once you have done this, the Workflow Template will show the purple badge "On Portal".

It's important to note that each Workflow task step that you want to be present in Portals needs to be shared to Portals too, via the "Shared In Portal" toggle switch. This enables you to share some task steps (external tasks - to be seen/completed by customers/prospects) but not others (internal steps - to be seen/completed by you and your co-workers only). Setting this in a Workflow Template means you don't need to set it for each individual Workflow record.

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You also need to share Workflow Template task steps to Portals if you want the option to select an End User type field to dynamically populate task owners with External Users, as we go through next in this article.

An "External User" is an End User (a person at one of your prospect/customer Companies) who has been added to a Portal.

When a Workflow is shared to a Portal, you can manually select an External User to be the owner of a specific task.

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In this article, we are going to look at how you can automatically assign External Users as task owners, so you don't need to manually do it for each Workflow record.

You set this up via Workflow Templates. To summarize:

We describe the setup steps in more detail later in this article.

Once set up, your automated process will look like this:

Let's look at the setup in further detail. There are a few setup stages here to go through.

You need to have a field that will be populated in your Planhat tenant for your task step owner. For example, let's say your Workflow Template includes a step that will be carried out by the "Main User" or "CS Ops" person at each Company. You create this "Main User" or "CS Ops" etc. field as a custom field ...

You can do this for each such field/role you want to specify - i.e. you can repeat the setup here if you want to assign different types of End Users to different task steps in Workflow Templates.

How can you create these custom fields? You can read a separate article on creating custom fields generally here, but in short:

Now that the field exists in your Planhat tenant, you can populate it for each Company with a End User belonging to that Company.

Now you can include this custom "End User" type field within Workflow Templates. This will be a dynamic reference, meaning that it will be filled in with an actual value (an End User / External User) in individual Company Workflow records.

There are a couple of pre-requisites for you to have this option:

Once you have done this, you'll be able to select your field as a task step owner.

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The End User in the field also needs to exist as an External User in the Portal, so when the Workflow is created it can be populated with an existing External User.

You can read about manually adding External Users to Portals here. It's also possible to automatically add External Users to Portals via Portal Templates, which we discuss in a more advanced process later in this article.

Portal Templates (configured within the Portal Manager) enable you to automatically populate Portals with content (Sections and Pages) and Internal/External Users. To learn all about Portal Templates, check out our separate article here.

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"Custom Template Sections" are created specifically in a Portal Template (rather than being selected for inclusion in a Portal Template), and are copied (rather than mirrored) into each Portal built from that Portal Template. You can choose to include Workflow Templates within these custom Template Sections. You can select from Workflow Templates that have been shared to Portals (as we discussed earlier in this article).

Setting this up means that when you create a Portal for a Company, it will automatically include a Workflow from that Workflow Template (positioned as per your configuration in the Portal Template).

This on its own is super useful, but what's even better is that you can combine it with the dynamic External User task owners we discussed earlier - we'll go through this next.

We are going to build on the previous worked example.

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As you can see, although there is a bit of setup required here, once that's done, running the process is very quick and easy, and automating these elements saves you time and ensures consistency/accuracy of data, by removing manual steps.