Customer Portals

A customer portal is a channel that external users reach without an internal account. Customers submit requests, follow their progress, and browse published articles. Each submission becomes a work item in a workspace.

Portal hub with customer-facing portal cards

What a portal contains

A portal has:

  • A name, a slug, and a description.
  • A hero background and branding.
  • One or more request types.
  • A layout of sections that group the request types.
  • One or more served workspaces.
  • An optional knowledge base.
  • Customer access rules.

The portal hub

The hub is the landing page for a signed-in customer. It shows the portal sections and the request types in each section. A customer selects a request type to open its form.

A customer can open more than one portal when the account has access to each portal.

Customer features

A signed-in customer can:

  • Submit a request from a request type.
  • Save an in-progress request as a draft and resume it later.
  • Follow open requests in My Requests.
  • Reply on a request thread.
  • Attach files to a request.
  • Browse the knowledge base.
  • Manage sign-in methods in Profile & security, including passkeys.

Admin configuration

Channel managers configure the portal from the channel admin shell:

Area Purpose
Portal settings Slug, title, description, active state, and customer access.
Request types The forms customers complete and the routing to a workspace and item type.
Sections The hub layout that groups request types.
Customize The hero background, gradient, and request type order.
Knowledge base Published workspace pages and an optional Docmost share link.
Intakes The mailboxes that feed the portal.
Customer replies The outbound reply queue.

Create a portal

  1. Open Admin and select Channels.
  2. Select Create Channel.
  3. Enter a channel name.
  4. Select the Portal type.
  5. Enter a slug. The portal URL is /portal/<slug>.
  6. Select a category and enter a description. Both steps are optional.
  7. Select Create Channel.
  8. Open the portal and select the Configuration tab.
  9. Select the Target Workspaces.
  10. Enter the Portal Title.
  11. Select the Registration Mode.
  12. Enter the Allowed Email Domains. This step is optional.
  13. Turn on Enable Portal.

Requests become work items

A portal request becomes a work item in the target workspace. The internal team triages and delivers it with the same boards, backlogs, and views as other work.

On the work item, a comment is either a public update or an internal note. The internal note stays inside the workspace. The public update appears in the portal.

Permissions

Managing a portal requires channel-management permission on the portal channel. Creating an intake also requires workspace administration on the routing workspace and management on any linked portal.