Portals and Digital Sales Rooms

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.

Why a Portal Rather Than a File Link

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:

• It looks like you: recipients land in a branded space with your wording, not a generic download page.
• Access is a decision, not an accident: you choose whether the link is open, gated by email, or protected by a password, and when it stops working.
• Content stays current: the portal serves what is in the library now, so updating an asset updates what recipients see.
• You can see what happened: visits and downloads are recorded against the portal.

Internal and External Portals

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.

Controlling Access

External portals are not simply public or private. Access is configured per portal:

• Open: anyone with the link gets in, with no further step.
• Email required: visitors must identify themselves. You can accept any email address, restrict access to specific addresses, or allow an entire domain so anyone at a client or partner organisation can enter.
• Password protected: a password is required, on its own or alongside an email requirement.
• Expiry date: the portal stops working on a date you set, which matters for campaign material, embargoed content and time-limited licences.

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.

Organising What Recipients See

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.

Branding the Experience

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.

Digital Sales Rooms

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.

Knowing What Happened

Every portal records its own engagement:

• Unique visitors: how many distinct people opened it.
• Total visits: how often it was opened.
• Total downloads: how many files were taken.

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.

Keeping Portals Under Control

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:

• Set an expiry by default, not as an exception. A portal for a specific proposal or campaign has a natural end date, and setting it at creation is far easier than auditing later.
• Decide who can publish externally. Creating portals and making them publicly accessible are permission-controlled, so the ability to put content in front of an outside audience can be limited to the people who should be making that call.
• Link accounts and contacts when the portal belongs to a relationship rather than a moment. It costs nothing at creation and is what turns portal traffic into something you can attribute later.

Portals, Public Links and Showcases

Portals are one of three ways to get assets out of the library, and they are not interchangeable:

• Portals are for curated, access-controlled delivery to a known audience, with tracking. Use them for clients, partners, campaigns and sales.
• Public links share a single image openly with no identification or access control, and always serve the current version. Use them for embedding an image in a website, an email or a document.
• Showcases are visual galleries drawn from a saved filter, so they stay current as matching assets change. Use them when presentation and layout are the point.

When to Use a Portal

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.