Portal Services in Customer Administration

This section describes what parts of customer administration relate specifically to Portal Services.

What are external and internal users?

A difference is made between internal and external users for Portal Services.

For technical reasons, customer and user administration overlap when you set up users for Portal Services.

​•​Internal users: These are all users registered in Prinect Production, i.e. in the production shop.

You always set up internal users in user administration ("Administration > Settings > Users").

​•​External users: These are all customer users.

You always set up external users in customer administration ("Administration > Settings > Customers"). Each time you set up a contact with person for a customer, you can create an external user account for this person. This external user immediately appears in the user administration.

Structure of the Customer Administration

The following chart shows an example of how you could set up a customer with different contact types and persons.

​•​"Customer": Set up a customer first. The customer represents the company or organization.

​•​"Contact Type": The contact mode divides the company into several areas. Persons are normally allocated to one contact type. But you can also create contact modes without persons. Each customer is automatically allocated to the "Customer" contact mode. You cannot delete this mode. You can create or delete any other contact modes for this customer.

​•​"Person": A person always belongs to a contact mode. The persons represent the customer's employees. You can define only one person for the "Customer" contact mode.

​•​"User" (only for Portal Services): To work with Portal Services, you need external users. When you set up a contact mode with a person in the customer administration, you can also set up a user account for an external user for this person right away. This external user appears in the user administration.

In the above chart, you can see person B is allocated to both contact modes A and B. In spite of different contact modes, this person has the same user account.

Agencies

You can specify the optional agency function for each customer (see Customer context menu > "Properties" (customer entry in the customer table > right mouse button) "Agency" item).

The agency function means to work as a service provider for another customer. This is always job-specific. This means that you can assign an agency to a job when creating a job (see Job-Specific– Selecting an Agency While Creating a Job).

In the following chart you see the possible relations between customers and agencies.

You set up a job 1 for customer 1 in Prinect Production. Allocate the "Customer 2" agency to this job when setting it up. In other words, Customer 2 is to act as agency "Customer 2" for this Job 1.

Consequently, all users of agency "Customer 2" have the same permissions to Job 1 as Customer 1.

Customer 2 can work for several customers as an agency. When setting up Job 3 for Customer 3, you can accordingly allocate Customer 2 as agency "Customer 2". This will give agency "Customer 2" permissions for Jobs 1 and 3.