A portal is a branded space, reached through a single link, holding exactly the assets you want a particular audience to see. It is how content leaves the library without leaving your control: access can be restricted, the link can expire, and you can see what recipients actually did with what you sent. This article covers what portals do, how access works, and how the same feature is used as a digital sales room.
Most external sharing still happens through a file transfer service or a cloud drive link, and the problems are consistent. The recipient sees a file list rather than your brand. There is no way to withdraw access once the link is out. Nothing tells you whether anyone opened it. When the content is updated, everyone who kept the old link keeps the old file.
A portal addresses each of those directly:
Portals come in two forms, and the difference is who can reach them.
Internal portals are for people inside your workspace. They generate no public link and are accessible only to the workspace members you assign, who keep their existing library permissions. They suit review workflows, curated sets for a specific team, and staging content before it goes out.
External portals generate a link that can be shared with anyone outside the workspace. They are the option for client sharing, partner and press resource hubs, campaign distribution and gated content.
A portal can also be created directly from a folder, sharing that folder's contents rather than a hand-picked list.
External portals are not simply public or private. Access is configured per portal:
Two further settings control what recipients can do once inside: whether they may download assets, and whether they may re-share the portal onward. You can also set the welcome text recipients see on the portal itself and on the sign-in screen.
By default every asset in a portal appears in one view, which is fine for a handful of files and unhelpful for a hundred. Portal collections group assets into sections inside the portal, with up to two levels of nesting and a custom thumbnail for each.
The important property is that collections are specific to the portal and independent of your library structure. Your library can be organised for how your team works while a client sees the same assets arranged by product, by campaign, by usage rights, or by whatever makes sense to them.
A portal carries your workspace branding, so recipients arrive somewhere that looks like your organisation rather than a file host. You can set the welcome text shown on the portal itself, and separate welcome text and description on the sign-in screen, which is worth using: the sign-in screen is often the first thing an external recipient sees, and a line explaining what they are about to access and who sent it removes most of the hesitation around entering an email address.
Collections can each carry a custom thumbnail, which does more work than it sounds like. A portal of twelve unlabelled sections is a navigation problem; a portal of twelve recognisable tiles is a menu.
A digital sales room is the same feature, used for a specific job. Instead of one portal serving a whole audience, a salesperson creates one per prospect or account: the proposal, the relevant case studies, the product material, and nothing else. It is branded, it is a single link to send, and it can be edited while the deal is live, so adding a document mid-conversation does not mean sending another attachment.
What makes it work as a sales tool rather than just a share is the record linkage. External portals can be linked to an account and a contact, so engagement is attributed rather than anonymous. You are not only seeing that the portal was opened eleven times, you are seeing which client did the opening and what they kept coming back to, which is a materially different conversation to walk into.
Every portal records its own engagement:
Where an account and contact are linked, that engagement carries through to those records. Beyond the obvious value to a sales conversation, this is the only reliable way to learn which content actually gets used, which is what tells you what to produce more of and what to retire.
Portals are easy to create, which is the point, and also the thing that needs managing. A workspace that has been sharing for two years accumulates portals nobody remembers making, still live, still serving content that may since have been superseded.
Three habits prevent most of it:
Portals are one of three ways to get assets out of the library, and they are not interchangeable:
Reach for a portal whenever content is leaving your organisation and you would care about any of the following: that it looks like yours, that the wrong person cannot forward their way in, that it stops being available at some point, or that you find out whether it landed. If none of those matter and you just need an image in a newsletter, a public link is less work.