In many cases, you might need to work with people that you don't want to bring on as workspace or application collaborators. For example, you might need to collect information from contractors, clients, or volunteers without showing those people anything in your applications; you might also want to show people some parts of a base without showing them all of the information in an application.

In these types of situations, you might want to consider Yeeflow's Service Portals.

Service portals are secure application gateways designed to provide customers, vendors, and partners with a single point of access to a company's products, services, and information.

A Service Portal is a great way for an organization to allow its customers, vendors, and partners to log into their dedicated internal system and access restricted data. Instead of building your own authentication and security mechanisms, you can use Yeeflow service portals. Your users will be able to sign up with your portal instead of signing up with Yeeflow's account.

Your customers can log in to your dedicated portal, access applications shared with them, submit data, and most importantly, view and edit the records. Service Portal provides you with an opportunity to present your application with a brand identity personal to your organization.

With a dedicated hub at their disposal, your customers, business partners, and employees can find exactly what they’re looking for, just when they need it. Using portals, your users can get context-specific access to applications, find help, post questions, access resources, or raise support requests.

Self-service portals allow users to interact directly with customer support processes, and manage data relevant to them, like policies, invoices, deliveries, orders, and online payments.

By giving users their own login credentials, you not only deliver a more personalized experience but also help them become a part of your company. And portals already have built-in authentication and security mechanisms in place. So once your portal is set up, clients can simply sign up and log in—it's that easy!

Follow up the creation of our Projects for excellence application. Imagine that you want to invite your customers to collaborate with your internal team to work together on Tasks. You can then create a service portal for customers to login and create new tasks and view, modify existing tasks stored in the Tasks data list of the "Projects of excellence" application.

In this stage, we’ll walk through how to create the service portal in Yeeflow, and invite your customers to access.

Firstly, let's open the Projects for excellence application. From the top-right of the application's header, click the Gear icon, and click the "Service Portal" item from the pop-up menu items.

This will navigate you to the Service Portal configuration page. Click the "Configure your service portal" button to open the wizard page.

From the setup pop-up window, set the portal name as "Project Tracker", and set the customized URL of your service portal.

Click "Next" to select the portal type. The public portal will allow any users to sign-up and access. The Private portal will only access users whom has been invited or added to login and access. Let's select "Private" and click Next button.

The next step will ask you which components you'd like to share to the the service portal. The components you can select will only include the components you've created inside in this application. The approval forms are NOT available for service portal, so you cannot see the "New project approval" form the list. Let's select to include the Projects and Tasks data lists, and disable the Reports (Dashboard) as we want the have this dashboard be available for internal only.

Click the "Complete" button to finish your configuration. It takes a few seconds to complete the creation of this new service portal. One the service portal is created, you will be navigated to the service portal settings page. From here you can see the URL of this portal site.

Copy this URL and paste to the web browser to open this portal site. You will then be navigate to the login page. Here is where your customers will login to this service portal.

From the service portal settings page, under the Data Lists group, click the "Configure" button of the Tasks data list. In the Tasks settings page, choose the forms for New/Edit/View item (You can create separate list forms for service portal users), and the type of open those forms (Pop-up, or full screen).

Next, Set the access permissions of this data list, like which data views can be accessed by the portal users, and if allow create new items or edit/delete existing items etc.

Then get back to the service portal settings page, under the Data Lists group, click the "Configure" button of the Projects data list. In the Projects settings page, Set the access permissions of this data list.

Click "Menu" from the top tab menu to open the Menu settings page. You can choose which components can be displayed on the navigation menu of the service portal. For this case, you just want to allow customers to see the Tasks list. So from the left components list, click the checkbox of "Tasks" under the Data Lists group. and click "Add to Menu" button to add Tasks to the right menu list.

You can then choose to add custom icons, or custom the display title of this menu item.

Click "Save changes" at the bottom of this page to save your changes.

Next, Let's click the "Appearance" from top tab menu to open the appearance settings. You can set the icon and logo for your service portal by uploading the related images. Or, change the styles of the Header and Navigation menu here.

Click the "Save changes" at the bottom of this page to save your changes.

Let's click "Users" from top tab menu to open the portal users management page. Click "+ Add User" button to add customers:

The users you added here will receive an email notification with invitation message. They can use the link included in the invitation email to access the portal site then.

By login to the service portal, the customers will see the tasks data list with all the records. They can also click the view the details of each task, edit the task info, or add new tasks. All those changes will also be affected and be viewed by the internal users from the "Projects of excellence" application.

Let's get back to the "Projects of excellence" application, and open the Tasks data list. Click "+ New column" from the end of the list to add a new field.

Select User from the field type, and set the display name as "Customer". From the user type, select "Portal User", then set the default value as "Current User". Click Save button to create this new field.

Now, once the customers login to the service portal to create a new task, the customer field will automatically set the default value to the customer's account.

You can also create multiple data views and list forms to show each customer with different data, or using the User Groups to manage portal users to different level of permission controls etc.