Planning for Your Portal

Planning for Your Portal

Just like any other project, it is important to plan out your needs and expectations to help you ensure a smoother setup process.  As part of your ZPortals subscription you get a full Onboarding session with our team, and we can help guide you.  

For those of you DIY'ers here is a guide to help you plan out your Portal project. 

1. Decide if you want your portal to be on your main domain or a sub domain.  (Domain vs Sub Domain)
2. Decide if you need an Account Based or Contact Based portal. (Account Based vs Contact Based Portal Types)
3. Take an overview of your data relationships and ask yourself the following questions:  (Learn more about Data Relationships)
  1. Who will be logging in?
    1. Will this be a client, partner, or some other type of user?
    2. Do you have more than one type that need to see different pieces of information?
  1. What data do you want them to see?
    1. What modules are you going to have?
    2. In those modules, what fields do they need to see?
  1. What do you want them to be able to do?
    1. What fields in the modules you show do you want them to edit?
    2. Will they need to upload documents or receive documents from you?
    3. Do you want them to see and/or pay invoices?
    4. Do you want them to submit tickets instead of just using email?
    5. Do you want them to be able to chat with you live?
    6. What forms would they need to fill out?
    7. Do you have any 3rd party sites you want to bring into your portal like custom dashboards?
  1. Determine which plan you need. 
    1. How often do you expect users to login?
    2. Do you have a large number of customers?
    3. How many pages (on average) would a customer click on in a single session?
Once you have all the answers to these questions you can book a call with us or venture into the rest of our Knowledge Base to help turn this plan into a live Portal. 

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