Customer Support Portal

The Customer Support Portal is a self-service website you can open up to your customers, branded per company and reached at a web address of your choosing. It's a separate, lightweight experience from the workspace your team works in — fast to load, comfortable on a phone, and designed so a customer never touches your team's tools. Signing in there opens onto that one company's portal and nothing else.

How your customers sign in

Sign-in is passwordless — there are no passwords to create, forget, or reset. A customer proves who they are with their email address and a one-time link or code, and that's it.

1. They open your portal and enter their email address.
2. DevStride emails them both a one-time link and a 6-digit code.
3. They either click the link or type the code back into the portal.
4. They're signed in, and their session lasts about a week before they're asked to sign in again.

Why passwordless sign-in is safe

Opening a portal to the outside world raises fair questions about security. Here's what protects it, in plain terms:

• No way to fish for who has access. When someone enters an email, they always see the same friendly confirmation — whether or not that address is allowed in. A stranger can't use the portal to discover who your customers are, or even whether a given person is one of them.
• Links and codes expire quickly. A sign-in link or code only works for about 15 minutes after it's sent, and a code stops working after several wrong tries. An old email sitting in an inbox can't be used to get in later.
• Sessions don't last forever. A signed-in session expires after about a week, so an unattended device doesn't stay signed in indefinitely.
• Access is cut off the moment you revoke it. The portal re-checks access on every visit. If you block a requester, erase them, remove them from their company, or disable Service Desk, their access ends immediately — you don't have to wait for their session to run out.
• A separate door. A customer signed in to the portal is a portal-only identity. It reaches that one company's portal and nothing else — never your team's workspace, boards, or internal notes. And each company's portal keeps its own sign-in state: being signed in to one portal never carries over to another company's portal, even in the same browser.

Who can sign in: access modes

Each company decides who is allowed to sign in to its portal. You choose one of three access modes on the company record:

Pick the mode that matches how open you want each customer's portal to be — wide open for a public-facing desk, domain-restricted to keep it to a customer's own staff, or invite only for a tightly controlled account.

Branding the portal for each company

A company's portal can wear that customer's look rather than a generic one. On the company record you can set:

• a logo — upload an image file for DevStride to store and serve, or link one by URL if it's already hosted somewhere,
• header text to greet them,
• a primary color for buttons and accents.

Set none of these and the portal falls back to a neutral DevStride-branded shell — so every company has a clean, presentable portal from day one, and you dress it up only where it's worth doing. A small "Powered by DevStride" note sits in the footer.

Portal language

The portal automatically detects the visitor's language from their browser, so a customer sees it in whatever language their device prefers. You can also set a Default language on the company record to pin the portal to a specific language when you'd rather not rely on the browser.

Where you configure all this

Everything above — the portal's web address, its access mode, its branding, and its default language — lives on the company record, under Service Desk → Companies. Open a company, and you'll find its portal settings alongside the per-company defaults you already manage there. A Preview portal link on the company opens its portal in a new tab, so you can check what you've set exactly as your customers will see it.

Two permissions come into play:

• Manage Requesters — configure a company's portal: its web address, access mode, branding, and default language. This is the same permission that lets you manage requesters and companies.
• Manage Service Desk Settings — enable Service Desk in the first place (the portal only exists once the desk is on). See Enabling Service Desk.

See Permissions for how these roles fit together, and Requesters & Companies for managing the customers who'll be signing in.

What's here now — and what's coming

Today, your customers can sign in to your branded portal. After they do, they land on a welcome page that lets them know their requests and updates will live there.