Building a Community Portal App on Office 365
Community portal app built with BPA’s no-code app building platform on SharePoint/Office 365.
A community portal is a great way for any organization to centralize communication with their communities of clients, partners, stakeholders, or employees replacing inefficient emails. Portals can be used for different purposes, like help desk/ticketing, customer service, HR or others.
In this example, we have built a community portal app on Office 365 and SharePoint, using BPA’s app building platform. The app is completely configurable and was built in one day with no code!
The community portal app can be used as a standalone solution or can be connected to other BPA apps like CRM or Quality and compliance. At BPA, we are using a community portal since years to better serve our clients, answer tickets rapidly, share tutorials, documentation, FAQ, grant access to software packages and release notes.
With Office 365 and SharePoint, it’s possible to grant a secure guest access to users outside your organization (for example client organizations). External users can access a shared community portal with their Microsoft account or a non-Microsoft personal email with no Office 365 license needed (e.g. using a gmail account). External users will have limited permissions to access the community portal, post requests, view their own requests only, and access shared documentation in read-only.
Once a request is logged, it’s automatically linked with the right client organization and contact person. A discussion can be started between the client organization and the internal support team. Alerts are automatically sent to both parties. Documents or images can be attached to discussions. Internal discussions are not visible to the client organization.
The community portal app is be a perfect match for small and mid-sized organizations running on Office 365. The app will drastically reduce time to answer client requests, improve service efficiency and increase stakeholders satisfaction.
