2026-07-15

🌐 The Customer Support Portal Arrives

Service Desk started as email. Now your customers have a home of their own: a branded, self-service Customer Support Portal at your company's own web address. It's a fast, mobile-friendly page that lives separately from your team's DevStride workspace — your customers sign in there, and only there, and can never reach your boards, your data, or anyone else's company.

This first release delivers the portal itself and how customers get in: branded sign-in, passwordless login, and per-company access controls. The in-portal experience where customers browse and manage their requests is coming next (see What's next below).

🔑 Passwordless Sign-In

No passwords, ever. Getting into the portal takes seconds:

1. Your customer opens the portal and enters their email address.
2. They receive both a magic link and a 6-digit code by email.
3. They click the link on that device, or type the code — whichever is handier.
4. They're in, with a session that lasts about a week before they need to sign in again.

Security is built in quietly. The response after entering an email is identical whether or not that address can access your portal, so the portal can never be used to fish for who your customers are. Login links and codes expire after 15 minutes, and a code is retired after a handful of wrong guesses.

🎨 Make It Yours — Per-Company Branding

Each company you support gets its own portal look, set right on the Company record under Service Desk → Companies:

• Logo — your customer's own logo at the top of the page.
• Header text — a welcome line in your words.
• Primary color — the accent color that carries through the portal.

Set nothing and the portal falls back to a clean, neutral DevStride shell — so it always looks finished. Every portal carries a discreet "Powered by DevStride" in the footer.

🚪 Decide Who Can Sign In

Also on the Company record, choose an access mode that fits how open you want the portal to be:

• Open — anyone with a valid email can sign in.
• Domain-restricted — only people on that company's approved email domains.
• Invite only — only requesters your team has already added.

Access is re-checked on every visit, so it's always current. The moment you block a requester, erase them, move them to a different company, or turn Service Desk off, their access to the portal ends immediately — no waiting for a session to time out.

🌍 Default Language

The portal auto-detects each visitor's language from their browser, and you can set a Default language on the company record as a fallback. English is available today, with the groundwork in place to add more languages down the road.

🔒 Stronger Privacy — Hardened Requester Erasure

Erasing a requester ("right to be forgotten") is now thorough and final. When you erase someone, DevStride removes their personal information everywhere it was kept — their name, email, and phone; the original message that started their ticket; their personal details inside notifications and the activity log; and anything tied to their portal sign-in.

An erased requester cannot be quietly brought back — a later email from that person won't silently re-create or re-identify them. Tickets your team worked on are kept, but stripped of who they belonged to, so your history stays intact without the personal data.

⚠️ Erasure is permanent. Erasing a requester cannot be undone or reversed. Once it's done, the personal data is gone for good. Reach for Merge instead when you're consolidating duplicates you want to keep.

🛡️ Quieter, Safer Public Pages

We also tightened protection on the public-facing parts of Service Desk — the request form and portal sign-in — so bursts of automated or abusive traffic are throttled before they reach your team. There's nothing to configure; it just runs.

🏢 Company Setup, Smoothed Out

The company dialog under Service Desk → Companies — where all of the portal settings above live — picked up three improvements of its own:

• Email domains commit the way you'd expect. Typing a domain and pressing Tab, or simply clicking away, now adds it to the list — not just pressing Enter. Domains are also normalized to lowercase as they're added, so Acme.COM and acme.com can't sneak in as two entries.
• Preview the portal in one click. A new Preview portal link on the company opens that company's portal in a new tab, so you can check the branding you just set exactly the way your customer will see it.
• Upload a logo — or keep linking one. The portal logo can now be uploaded as an image file, stored by DevStride, instead of only pasted as a URL to an image hosted elsewhere. The URL option is still there if that's how you work.

🎨 Brand Colors That Stay Readable

Whatever primary color a company's portal is given, the portal now keeps it readable: brand colors are automatically adjusted to accessibility-contrast-safe (WCAG) variants wherever they back text and controls. Pick a very light brand color and the portal quietly renders a readable derivative of it — your brand still shows through, and nobody squints at an unreadable button.

One fix in the same area: signing in to one company's portal no longer carries over to a different company's portal in the same browser. Each portal keeps its own sign-in state, cleanly separated.

📚 Full guide: the new Customer Support Portal page in the Service Desk docs.

📬 Notifications That Don't Get Lost

Email and Slack notifications now travel through a durable delivery pipeline: if the email or Slack provider stumbles, DevStride retries automatically until the notification lands — without ever sending it twice. There's nothing to configure; deliveries are simply more dependable.

💡 What's next: This release opens the door — sign-in and branding. Coming next is the experience inside the portal: a My Requests list, a full conversation view so customers can follow and reply to their tickets, self-service request submission, and a knowledge base. Further out on the roadmap: service-level (SLA) timers and more channels beyond email, like Slack and Microsoft Teams.