Customer portal settings

Settings > Customer portal controls the portal your customers' contacts sign in to. It is in the Service desk group of Settings. It has seven tabs, each with its own address: General, Home and navigation, Appearance, Sections, Access and sign-in, Notices and announcements and What customers see. Most settings can be set for every customer and then changed for one customer. Who can sign in, and what each person may do, is set on each contact through their portal roles.

This guide is about the settings page. For what contacts see once they are in, and for each part of the portal in depth, see the Customer portal section. The setup assistant's portal step sets every role at once in one role table, with I don't know, pick for me if you would rather start from our suggestion: see Setting up the portal.

Every customer or one customer#

Tabs with per-customer settings start with Change it for: Every customer or One customer. Pick a customer and each option says whether it is their own or follows every customer's, with Use every customer's to go back. A customer's own values are also on the customer's Settings tab. Reset this page at the top, shown once something differs from the default, puts every portal setting back to the standard set-up, and Open portal opens the portal in a new tab.

General#

• Portal: On or Off. Off closes the portal for everyone, for example while you are still setting up. Contacts keep their access and can sign in again when you turn it back on, and they see your Message when the portal is off.
• Address: where the portal lives, for example https://support.yourmsp.co.uk/portal. Press the copy button and share it with customers. It comes from your server's own address; on a self-hosted install, change PORTAL_URL in the server's settings to use another. Customers can also have their own custom domain.
• Portal name: what contacts see at the top of the portal and in its emails, usually your company name. Check the Preview and press Save name.
• Wording: the Welcome text, Support email address, Support phone number and Message when the portal is off.
• Files: the largest file a contact can attach, how many per message, and how many uploaded files one contact can have waiting to be sent.
• Quote links: how long a quote's link keeps working after an answer.
• Installable app: Offer push notifications, so contacts can switch on the portal's notifications from their Profile for replies, tickets waiting on them and approvals. The portal can always be added to a home screen.

Tip: Set the name before you invite anyone. Contacts should see your company, not the name of your software.

Home and navigation#

What Home shows (open tickets listed, service status, the first-visit welcome), the managers' health overview and its tiles, the order of the sections in the portal's bar and the company dashboard's blocks. The first six sections a contact has show in the bar and the rest sit under More; on a phone the bar is Home, Tickets, New, then Approvals or the next most useful page, and Menu. See Setting up the portal.

Appearance#

The portal's name, logos and icon, brand and accent colours, font, corners, density, side menu style, Home's greeting, cover picture and tiles, the side menu's order and your own links, the footer, the sign-in page and how customer emails look, with a live preview of the real portal. See Portal appearance.

Sections#

Turn Tickets, Billing, Payments, Quotes, Projects, Help centre, Service status and Reports on or off. Each says what it covers: with Tickets off, for example, contacts reach you by email or phone only. A customer can have its own choice on its Settings tab.

Access and sign-in#

• Access: Give new contacts portal access (off by default: new contacts cannot sign in until someone turns access on for them). Underneath, how many contacts have access and how many signed in during the last 30 days, with Manage contacts.
• Signing in: how long sign-in links and invitations last, how long contacts stay signed in, idle sign-out, the longest a sign-in lasts, the six digit code in sign-in emails, Sign in with Microsoft, Contacts must sign in with Microsoft, portal passwords and two-factor.
• Self-registration: whether people with an address on one of a customer's email domains can create their own account, straight away or after a member of staff approves them. Account requests at the foot of the tab lists who is waiting, with Approve and Turn down.
• People: what customers' managers may do for their colleagues (add them, reset a password, set up multi-factor sign-in again), whether new colleagues need your approval and whether marking someone as left raises a leaver ticket.
• Profile and sign-in: contacts' own photos, passkeys and how long See the portal as lasts.
• Sign-in apps: the Microsoft app registration behind Sign in with Microsoft.

Note: Contacts must sign in with Microsoft is for a customer on Microsoft 365. It holds for every way in: the sign-in page offers only Microsoft to addresses in the customer's email domains, and no link, code or password is sent to them.

See Sign-in, profiles and notifications and Portal permissions and people.

Notices and announcements#

Service notices are short and time-bound (holiday opening hours, a phishing warning, planned maintenance): they show at the top of the portal and the chat widget and, if you choose, on customers' computers by the tray. Announcements are news on Home and the News page that stays to read again. Each has its own New notice or New announcement button and shows who it is for and how many devices or contacts have seen it. Under Notifications: whether managers may follow their company, the hour the daily digest goes and how long the bell keeps items.

What customers see#

The finer choices, a card each:

• New requests: extra questions on a new request (how it is affecting them, which computer, when it is needed by).
• Services and agreements: whether managers and billing contacts see their contracts, where the support hours went, and the lines and services from suppliers you resell them, with what each costs and how long before the supplier's notice deadline they should tell you about a change.
• Tickets in the portal: the expected reply time, time logged, who sees tickets raised by monitoring, and whether contacts may say a ticket is now urgent or ask Any news?.
• Devices: whether devices show, which facts, and self-service fixes.
• Transparency: the log of what you did on their devices.
• Help centre: suggesting help articles while a new ticket is typed.
• Billing in the portal, Assistant in the portal, Company dashboard and Documents.
• Information requests and Sign-offs: automatic reminders to whoever still has to answer or sign. See To do, sign-offs and presentations in the portal.

Settings here that differ from the default show Changed with Reset to default. See The settings catalogue and overrides.

Give one contact access#

1. Open the contact, from Customers > Contacts or the customer's People and sites tab.
2. In the Customer portal card, press Turn on portal access.
3. Press Change permissions. Under Portal roles, pick one or more roles, such as User, Finance, Manager or IT lead (in the Company edition Employee, Department head and Admin): the contact gets everything their roles give together. Underneath, tick anything else they can do beyond raising tickets and seeing their own, such as Every ticket for the customer for the person who looks after IT, then press Save.
4. Press Invite to portal. They get an email with a link to the portal.

The card then shows their Portal roles, what they Can do, and when they last signed in. Portal roles explains what each role sees, including costs, billing, the security pages and reports, and the quote acceptance limit. To stop someone signing in, turn their portal access off. To check what they see, use See the portal as them on the same page (see See the portal as a contact).

What else shapes the portal#

Pages for modules that are switched off in Modules do not appear.

Permissions#

The customer portal's settings are part of the Tickets area in Roles and permissions: someone who is not an administrator needs manage there and the role's module settings switch. See What each role switch controls. See the portal as a contact is its own action, which technicians and above have by default.