In case you were wondering, we are still around even though it’s been awfully long time since our last tip. Festivities season was upon us but the real reason was that we were just too darn busy. That’s good, right?

Now, we are back and, of course, with a bunch of tips. Now, brace yourself. I’ve been working with the portals for the past few weeks. What it means is that tips about portals are going to dominate our feed for the next N days.

Ready? Let’s go.

O Accounts, where art thou?

We’ve been repeatedly told that an authenticated portal user is always associated with a contact, regardless of the authentication method used. Once upon a time we could use accounts but not any more. So, good bye, accounts? Not so fast.

Turns out, when a user signs in, they will inherit any web role assigned to the parent account. Boom. That little known feature actually allows very effective management of the base permissions on a portal for your customers or partners. Instead of assigning and managing web roles for thousands of users, you can now assign and manage roles for hundreds of accounts instead.

If contacts have a parent account that happened to be a partner, assign Partner web role to the account and, presto, all contacts under the account will now have Partner role after signing in. Partner level was dropped to Silver from Platinum? Just replace the web role in one place and all 27 contacts under that partner are good to go with demoted permissions.

(Cover photo by Mikkel Bergmann on Unsplash)