Project Portal Overview

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The Project Portal is a feature in LiquidPlanner that allows you to share project work 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 see only a project-level schedule status, plus a subset of key schedule data at the task level (remaining efforts, expected finish dates, & deadline dates). You can publish a complete schedule PDF snapshot to the portal at any time.
• Portal guests can own tasks, and even create them; but they can't estimate their tasks or log progress against them.  You'll have to do that for them as necessary to keep your schedule moving along. 
• Portal guests don't have timesheets, so progress logged on behalf of a portal guest will not be accounted for in timesheet data export. 
• There is no resource leveling for portal guests. Since they don't have an availability setting, all tasks assigned to a portal guest will stack up on the current day unless pushed out by delays or dependencies. 
• Portal guests can participate fully in these collaboration features: comments, notes, links, 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 settings > members & access control > portal control.  
2. Select the appropriate project 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.

In your plan, a project that has a portal enabled for it will have the shared icon next to it:

Enabled portals are viewable by all non-restricted workspace 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.

Sharing project 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 from the project folder's Details page will show up in the portal Details page. 
• If you have enabled sharing of the real-time project status, the project's deadline date, remaining effort, total done, completion date range and estimated finish date will be visible on the portal Summary page.     

Task-level information

• Only tasks that you specifically mark as shared will be visible on the portal Tasks page.
• To share a task with the portal, select it, then go to Collaborate > Share on Portal.  Or, double-click the task to open the edit pane, then then click the “Portal Status" button to mark it as Shared.  Note that you can multi-select more than one task first, then share them all at once. 
• In your plan, a task that has been shared with the portal will have the "shared" icon next to it. 
• All content from the Details page of a shared task will be visible in the portal. 

Schedule snapshots: 

• You can attach a PDF snapshot of your schedule to the portal when you want to share more task or timeline information than they'd normally see. 
• From the project folder’s Details page, click the “attach a schedule snapshot” link.  Choose which tasks you'd like to include, then either preview the PDF or attach it right away.
• The schedule PDF will be visible on the portal “Files" page, and you can filter to all schedule files on that page as well.

Inviting first-time portal guests

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

1. Go to workspace > members & access control > portal control.
2. Select a portal-enabled project on the left, then 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 settings > access and portal control > member access 
2. Select the portal guest on the member list to the left 
3. Check, or uncheck, the specific portals on the right to grant or revoke access.  Take advantage of the 'check 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 page icons:  

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

1. Go to settings > members & access control > portal control.
2. Select the appropriate portal-enabled project on the left, then uncheck the "enable portal" box to the right. 
3. 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 schedule 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 click collaborate > stop sharing.