Introducing Attachments to the Client Portal

December 4, 2013

4

min read

Table of Contents

Today we've released a major upgrade to the new Client Portal related to the improved Attachments module - Now you can share files, links and email attachments with your clients via the Client Portal, making it easier than ever to share and collaborate with your clients.

Control access with confidence

We realize that even in the most open and transparent relationships, there are things you'd rather keep to yourself. That's why we've built a powerful, easy-to-use access control model into Accelo so that you can choose to share exactly what you want with your clients.

You can now set the default permissions for sharing Attachments in the Portal at several levels:

For a specific object, such as a project
For a specific client, which will affect all projects, issues and so on for that client (except where the above-mentioned permissions are set)
Or for the overall module - such as Sales - which will affect all sales records (except where the 2 above-mentioned permissions are set)

But that's not all - you can also override the default permissions on a per-folder or file basis.

If your project is automatically sharing its attachments on the Portal but there are a couple of files you want to over-ride the visibility for, you can!

Clients also get cloud integrations

Now you can allow your clients to upload files themselves into the Client Portal - perfect for getting them involved and contributing! When they've got something to upload/share through the Client Portal, they can do more than just upload from their computer - they can now easily import/pick files from their Dropbox, Box, Google Drive or other cloud services.

Email attachments automatically captured

Thanks to Accelo's automatic email tracking, you now get the benefits of having all of your email attachments in one, central location. By combining this with the Client Portal, your clients can now easily see any file you've sent them via email under the Attachments tab in the Portal-- they can even see the files they have sent to you.

As an added bonus, we also automatically flag Attachments as shared with a specific client contact if they were part of the email conversation the attachment was against - so you can automatically share attachments through the client portal without having to remember to go in and play with permissions.

How to Activate Attachments

Activating Attachments in the Client Portal is easy.

Activate the Client Portal using the instructions here.
By default, clients will only be able to see the files you give them access to (the Visible to Some permission) - which to begin with, would only be files you've shared via email. You can change this to be more permissive (All) or turn off attachment access entirely (None) from the Client Portal Permissions screens.
When you're looking at the Attachments tab on a Sale, Project, Issue or Retainer, as long as the default Permissions in effect aren't Visible to none, you'll now see new Visibility options on the right-hand menu for each folder and file.
Where you over-ride the default permissions, you'll get an extra colored dot on the icon for the folder or file letting you know the visibility that is set - green is for All, yellow is for Some, and red is for None.
If you choose to have "Some" or selective permissions, you can edit which client contacts get access to that file also from the drop-down menu. To make things easy, we automatically add contacts who already got a copy of the attachment in an email (because it was sent to them, or they sent it to you) so you can get the benefits of sharing and transparency without the overhead of having to remember to manually share files.