VtigerCRM 5.1.0 Customer Portal

Customer Portal 5.1.0

Http://www.vtiger.com Customer Portal 5.1.0

http://www.vtiger.com/



The vtiger Customer Portal is an add-on package for vtiger CRM. You can host the Customer Portal package in your Web site and enables self-service to your customers to submit the trouble tickets for managing better customer relationship.

Earlier customer portal supported two tabs – Tickets and Faq. Now Faq is renamed to Knowledge base and Contact , Account , Products , Invoice , Quotes ,Services and Document tabs are added newly.

The new edition also displays the custom fields and custom blocks that are created for the modules and you can control the fields that you want to show in the Customer Portal through a profile called “Portal Profile” which is related to “portaluser”, this profile is specifically created to support the Customer Portal where you can show/hide the modules and as well as the fields.

NOTE: Only the following modules are allowed Tickets , Account , Contacts , Products , Services , Invoices , Quotes ,Knowledge Base (Faq) and Documents, even if you enable the other modules like Potentials it will not be displayed.

Login : To get the login details for the customer portal you need to create a contact in VtigerCRM with a valid email address and select a check box called Portal User during Contact's creation,you can also set the time limit for the portal access with support start date and support end date. Once the contact is created login credentials will be mailed to the user.

Client Side Configuration : We have configuration file in the root folder of the customer portal source called PortalConfig.php.

Server Path: Specify the absolute path (URL) of the VtigerCRM. For example, if your VtigerCRM server is running at http://vtigercrm.com/demo means you need to specify the Server_Path as given below:

$Server_Path = "http://vtigercrm.com/demo";

Authenticate_Path: Specify the absolute path (URL) of the vtiger Customer Portal directory in your Web site. For example, if you have extracted the vtiger Customer Portal related files in to your Web site at http://vtiger.com/demo/portal means you need to specify the value for Authenticate_Path parameter as given below:

$Authenticate_Path = "http://vtiger.com/demo/portal";





ModuleOrder : You can rearrange the order of the modules that are shown in the customer portal by rearranging the array below.$moduleOrder = array( HelpDesk =>Tickets,

Accounts =>Accounts,Contacts =>Contacts,Documents =>Documents,Products =>Products,Invoice =>Invoice,Quotes =>Quotes,Services =>'Services,Faq =>'Faq);

Now save the PortalConfig.php file.

In each tab, the customer now have the drop down which has two values – All/Mine (except for Knowledge Base, Account and Contact). Selecting All will show the records that belong to the logged in Contact, contact's account and the contacts that belong to same account.

Account tab will show the logged in Contact's account information.

Tickets/Quotes/Invoice/Documents/Services tab will show all the records that belong to logged in Contact, Contact's Account and the Contacts of the same account. Choosing the option 'Mine' will show only the records that are associated with the logged in Contact.

Products tab will show all those product that are associated with a Contact either directly or through Quotes or Invoice.

Below screen shots will demonstrate the new features added:-

Tickets:

Below will show all the tickets that are created by the logged in customer as well as his colleagues.





Consider an example where the logged in customer is Elizabeth Brown ,the Select Box contains Show Open tickets which will show only the tickets created by the logged in customer.





In the below snapshot all the Open tickets related to the contacts and the related contacts as well as parent accounts will be shown.

When you set viewall of any modules as false then the Customer will not be able to see the records that are related to other customers in that specific module in Customer Portal.

Example : 'Tickets'=> array('viewall' => true) is set to 'Tickets'=> array('viewall' => false)then the logged in Elizabeth Brown will not be able to see the others records.





Similarly for any modules you can set the variable for example the default value for invoices is true which gives you the drop down on the right hand side of the screen.

When you set the variable to false then the drop down will be hidden from the view.

In the above Snap snot the drop down for selecting all the records is removed and the Customer will only see his records , this is same for the others modules also.





Server Side Configuration

Now if you do not want your customer to see the records created by others then you can do it by disabling them from the PortalConfig.inc.php file which resides in the root folder of the VtigerCRM source.

Viewall : Here are the configuration variables below you can see an array of modules and “viewall” is used to display all the records(Logged in Customer,other Customer of the same Company and the Company)

Ticket_Assigned_to : By default the tickets created in the Portal will be assigned to 'admin'.

// Group or the User name, to whom the tickets created from portal are assigned by default.

'Ticket_Assigned_to' => 'admin',

OverRideCrmPrivacy : Consider a scenario when you have made your modules Private in your VtigerCRM , then the logged in Customer will not be able to see the records of other Customer of the same company's .The admin can override this and allow the Customer to see all the records

$PortalConfig_Parameters= Array (

'configModules' => array( 'Tickets'=> array('viewall' => true),'Faq' => array('viewall' => true),'Contacts'=> array('viewall' => true),'Accounts'=> array('viewall' => true),'Products'=> array('viewall' => true),'Services'=> array('viewall' => true),'Invoice'=> array('viewall' => true),'Quotes'=> array('viewall' => true),'Documents'=> array('viewall' => true)),

'Ticket_Assigned_to' => 'admin',

/* this will give you control on the records that are to be shown in customerportal, * if the module is made private the,then only the logged in contact's info are shown * By setting this variable to true you can allow the contacts to see the others contacts info also * This will basically override the crm **/ 'OverRideCrmPrivacy' => false

);





Server Side Profile Settings

Administrator can configure customer portal profile using Settings > Profiles link

A snapshot of the profile is as shown below where some modules are disabled by default and even enabling them will not be shown in customer portal.





Click on Edit button you will see a list of modules on the left hand side the check is provided which will check for module availability.





Every module have a list of fields which you can see when you click on the arrow on the right side,you can show/hide the fields in customer portal from here.

Create New Tickets:





This is the where you create New Tickets ,here you can relate the Ticket with Service Contract or the Products.

The detail view of the ticket is shown below if it is related to Service Contracts then Service Contract Information Block will be shown.





In the detail view of the Tickets you can post your comments and also add attachments





NOTE:Before attaching any file to the tickets please make sure that you have set a variable in your PortalConfig.php file which resides in Customer Portal source .

The variable is $upload_dir should have the temporary directory path which is used when we upload attachment Example : $upload_dir = 'E:/wamp/www/workspace/customerportal510/tmp';

In the above path the Customerportal510 is the folder name and “tmp” is the temporary folder name which will have your uploaded attachments.





Contacts : This is the list view of the Contacts , here all the Contacts of the same Accounts are shown.To go to the detail view of the click on the Last Name or the First Name.





Accounts: When you click on the Accounts module then you will see the detail view of the Account.





Products : The list view of the products is as shown below, this will show the products that are directly related to the Customer as well as the products that are related to the Customer through Quotes and Invoices.





The Detail View of the Products is shown below:





Documents : In this module you can download the files that are attached by clicking on the filename,the list view is as shown below.

The detail view consist of some basic information and file information.





Invoice and Quotes : These both modules are similar in their representation ,the list view of the invoices is as shown

From the detail view you can click on the Subject to get a copy of PDF of the Invoice/Quotes .





Services : The list view of this module is similar with the other module as shown in the snap shot.

The detail view of the Services module





Knowledge Base : In this module on the left hand side you have the categories and on the right hand side you have the Faq's for that category.

You have Search Boxes on the top to search for the Faq in the Categories.

When you click on the any of the Articles ,you will see the question and a possible answer ,below that a comment box is also provided and also the related Documents that are attached to it.





In the below snap shot you can see that:





Known Issues: For the Knowledge Base (Faq) module disabling the fields from the profile will not effect on the customer portal.

There can be issues when downloading file whose size exceeds 4MB. You can check the memory_limit in your php.ini file and increase it to suitable limit ,also you need to change the same in the config.inc.php file which is in the root folder of vtigerCRM source.

When you upload a file with extensions like .exe , .php etc the files will be renamed with extension .txt . The list of bad extensions is available in the config.inc.php file of the VtigerCRM source

Adding new values to tickets pick list from vtigerCRM will not work.



