Project Portal Overview

The Project Portal is a feature in LiquidPlanner that enables you to share individual projects with external clients or stakeholders and collaborate with them in a secure way. Any project folder in LiquidPlanner can have its own project portal, and you do not pay for portal guests! 

Use project portals to:

• Keep clients and stakeholders in the loop on projects without having to spend hours creating separate status reports.
• Exchange files, comments, schedules, and notes on projects in a centralized place.
• Manage external collaboration on multiple projects from within one workspace, keeping a single centralized schedule and record for your internal team. 

Here are some key things to consider when deciding if it's appropriate for someone to be a portal guest instead of a full workspace member:   

• Portal guests see only specific tasks that you choose to share with the portal. They have no visibility into your workspace.  
• Portal guests can own tasks, and even create them; but they can't estimate their tasks or log progress against them.
• Portal guests see only a project-level schedule status, plus a subset of key schedule data at the task level (remaining efforts, expected finish dates, & promise dates). You can publish a complete schedule PDF snapshot to the portal at any time. 
• Portal guests can participate fully in these collaboration features: comments, notes, attachments & email notifications.  Anything they add in the portal will be visible to all other portal guests and all workspace members.  

Setting up a project portal

1. Go to members > access and portal control > portal control.  Or, from the Plan > Organize view, select the project, click the collaborate tab, then click open a project portal...    
2. On the portal control page, be sure that the correct project is selected on the left. 
3. On the right side of the page, check the enable portal box.
4. Enter the names of your portal and organization. 
5. Confirm the types of information you'd like to share by checking the boxes.  When you uncheck the box next to any of these items, that category of information will be removed from view in the portal. You can reinstate it by checking the box again.
6. Upload your company logo (this will be displayed on your project portal and on any project schedules you publish)
7. Upload your client’s logo and it will be displayed on the project portal and any project schedules you publish.  It can serve as a visual cue to portal guests that they’re in the right place.

Enabled portals are viewable by all non-restricted workpace members and any portal guests you’ve invited into the portal. Restricted members will only see a portal if they have been granted access to the associated project. 

Once you’ve enabled your project portal, you can access it from the Go To menu, the settings page, or the project folder's collaborate page. 

Sharing data with a portal

Now that you’ve enabled your portal, it's time to share specific information with it. 

Project-level information:  by default, content that is added directly to the project folder's collaborate page will show up in the portal - description, detailed notes, comments, & files.  If you have enabled sharing of the real-time project status, the project's promise date, remaining effort, total done, completion date range and estimated finish date will also be visible in the portal "Overview" tab.    

Task-level information:  Only tasks that you specifically designate as shared will be visible in the portal  “tasks” tab.  To share a task with the portal, double-click it, then click the “shared” checkbox in the work tab of the task detail pane.  Or, right-click on the task > collaboration > share selection via project portal.  You can share several tasks at a time by using multi-select.

In your workspace, you'll see the "shared" icon next to the project folder itself and each task that has been shared with a portal.   

Schedule snapshots:  Attach a schedule snapshot to your portal as a PDF.  From the project folder’s collaborate page, click the “attach a schedule snapshot” link at the top of the page.  Choose which elements of your schedule you want to include, then either preview the PDF or attach it right away. The schedule PDF will be visible in the portal “Overview", "Project”, and "Files" tabs. 

Inviting first-time portal guests

First-time portal guests must be sent an email invitation:  

1. Go to members > access and portal control > portal control
2. Select a project portal on the left, and click the invite new guests button on the right. 
3. Enter the email address and click 'next'.
4. Put a checkmark next to all of the portals you want this person to access. 
5. Click 'send invitations'
6. The email invitation will include a link for that person to create and activate their LiquidPlanner sign-in.  When they do sign in, they will automatically land in the project portal.  

Managing portal access for existing guests

If a person is already a guest in one portal, you can easily grant them access to additional portals, or revoke access to portals as necessary: 

1. Go to members > access and portal control > people
2. Select the person from the portal guests list on the left
3. Check, or uncheck, the specific portals on the right to grant or revoke access.  Take advantage of the 'select all' & 'clear all' options if appropriate!  
4. Click Save

Navigating a project portal

Portal guests navigate through the project portal by clicking on a series of tabs. 

Your portal guests do not have to learn LiquidPlanner to use the portal!  To help them get up and running as quickly as possible, direct them to the 'help' link in the portal, which takes them to an article we wrote specifically for them:   

Navigating a project portal

You'll want to read that article as well, to understand exactly what your portal guests see.

Disabling a Project Portal

Go to members > access and portal control > portal control, and uncheck the "enable portal" box.

After you disable a portal, you'll see that the portal/shared icon no longer appears next to the Project folder itself.  However, in the plan view, individual tasks that had been shared with the portal will still be marked as shared.  This allows you to easily re-enable the portal at any time without having to re-share the individual tasks.  You can un-share the tasks by multi-selecting them, then right click > collaboration > stop sharing selection via project portal.