From http://wiki.vtiger.com/archives

This documentation applies to vtigerCRM 5.2.1 and vtigerCRM 5.2.0

About

The vtiger Customer Portal is an add-on package for Vtiger CRM.

You can host the Customer Portal package on your Web site and enable self-service to your customers to submit the Trouble Tickets for managing better Customer relationship and allow them to view the Invoice ,Quotes ,Products , Services, FAQ's and Documents which are related to him and his Company (if present).

The Customer Portal 5.0.4 showed only two module – Tickets and FAQ's.Now FAQ is renamed to Knowledge base. The Modules like Contacts, Accounts, Products, Invoice, Quotes,Services ,Documents, Assets tabs are added newly. The new edition not only shows the above modules but also displays the custom fields and custom blocks that are created for those modules in the Vtiger CRM.

The administrator can control the fields that he wants to show in the Customer Portal ,for this we have created an extension module called Customer Portal in Vtiger CRM which will allow you to rearrange the order of the tabs ,Enable/Disable tabs ,select the Users whose profile will be used to control the fields that will be shown in the portal.

Installation

1. Download the Customer Portal source from vtigercrm customerportal plugin. and place them in your web root

2. We have the configuration file at the root of the customer Portal source called PortalConfig.php where you need to set the following path as shown below :-

    Server_Path : Specify the absolute path (URL) of vtiger CRM server

     For example :- if your vtiger CRM server is running at http://vtigercrm.com/demo from browser,then you need to specify the server_path as given below :-

     $Server_Path = "http://vtigercrm.com/demo";

    Authenticate_Path: Specify the absolute path (URL) of the vtiger Customer Portal directory in your web root

     For example :- if you have extracted the Vtiger Customer Portal related files in to your Web root at your_server_path/portal means you need to specify the value for       

     Authenticate_Path parameter as given below:-

     $Authentic_Path = "http://your_server_path/portal";

    Upload Directory: Give a temporary directory path which is used when we upload attachment to the tickets ,all the uploaded attachment resides in this folder.

     For example:- $upload_dir = 'var/www/html/portal/tmp';

3.Save the PortalConfig file

4. Edit the Portal URL in the ;Customer Login Details' email template. vtiger sends this email to your Contact when you enable portal access (from Contact detail page). The PORTAL URL link in this template should be changed to the URL where you installed the Portal (in Step 1 above)

Go to Settings > Email Templates Edit the Customer Login Details

Login

To obtain the Login User name and Password,you need to create a Contact in the Vtiger CRM with a valid Email ID and in the Customer Portal Information block check the Portal User field. Before that make sure that you have set the Outgoing Server in Vtiger CRM

An Email will be sent to the Contact(Customer) with the login credentials. Using the Support Start Date and End Date you can set the time duration of portal access for your Customers(Contacts).

To set the link for the Login page of Customer Portal in the Email ,edit the Config.inc.php file in the root folder of Vtiger Source and add your Portal URL which is defined in $PORTAL_URL variable

Change Password

You can Change the Password by login in the portal and on the right top side you have a link called My Settings ,When you click on it a pop up will appear as shown.Here you can specify your new password.

Working

In each tab the customer have the drop down list which has two values - All/Mine(Except for knowledge base ,Account and Contact) . Selecting All will show the records that belong to the same Account which the customer belongs.

Accounts tab will show the logged in customer's Company details.

Contact tab will show show a list of Customer that belong to the same Company(Account).

Tickets/Quotes/Invoice/Documents tab will show all the records that belong to logged in Customer, Customer's Company and the Customers of the same Company. Choosing the option 'Mine' will show only the records that are associated with the logged in Customer.

Products/Services tab will show all those Product/Services that are associated with a Customer either directly or through Quotes or through Invoices.

Tickets

Below will show all the Tickets that are created by the logged in customer as well as his colleagues

The drop down box that is described above will appear in every tab(module) and you can choose to view your as well as your colleagues information.

The Related to Field gives the information to which Customer the Ticket belongs to.

If the customer wants to see the tickets on status he can use the filter shown below

Create new tickets

If you go to tickets tab you can see a button New Ticket by clicking on it you can create a new ticket

Relating Ticket to Service Contract

When Creating a new ticket you can relate that ticket to a service contract by selecting from the drop down list as shown in the below image :

Detail view

When you click on the title of the ticket its detail view will be shown if it is related to any service contract then service contract information will be shown.

In detail view of tickets you can post the comments and also add attachments,when you post a comment an E-mail will be sent to the customer.

The attachments will be converted as Documents in your vtiger CRM and will be attached to this ticked which can be viewed in more information tab.

Note:Before attaching any file to the tickets please make sure that you have set a variable in your PortalConfig.php file which resides 
in Customer Portal source

The variable is $upload_dir should have the temporary directory path which is used when we upload attachment. Example : $upload_dir = 'E:/wamp/www/workspace/customerportal510/tmp'; In the above path tmp is the temporary folder name which will have your uploaded attachments.

Contacts

If you go to contacts tab ,the contacts with the same account which the customer belongs to will display in the list view .

To go to Detail view of contacts click on First Name or Last Name

Accounts

When you click on Accounts module tab then you will see the detail view of the logged in customer's Account information.

Products And Services

If you click on Products tab it will show the products that are directly related to the Customer as well as the products that are related to the Customer through Quotes and Invoices this is same for Services also.

The list view of the Products is as shown below.

If you click on the product name you can see the detail view.

Documents

If you click on the documents tab you will the list view of documents that are related to the logged in customer .

To Download the attachment click on the file name

If you click on the Title the detail view of the document will be shown,the detail view consists of some basic information and file information.

Invoice and Quotes

These both modules are similar in their representation ,the list view of the invoices is as shown.

From the detail view you can click on the Subject to get a copy of PDF of the Invoice/Quotes.

Knowledge Base

In this module on the left hand side you have the categories and on the right hand side you have the FAQ's for that categories.

You have Search Boxes on the top to search for the FAQ's in the Categories as well as in the Products.

When you click on the any of the Articles ,you will see the question and its answer ,below that a comment box is also provided and also the related Documents that are attached to it.

Project Management

If the projects for that user is not present,we can see the following screenshot in the user's Customer Portal .

In that case,new project is created for that contact. Once it is created and saved,it will be shown in the Customer Portal as below.

If we create a project for the account related to the contact and select 'all' in the 'show' field of Customer Portal,the following screen shot is visible.

Once the project is created additional information like project tasks,project milestone can be added in the CRM which can be seen in the detail view of that project in the Customer Portal.

The Customer Portal also shows the 'Raise Ticket' tab in the detail view of any project.

This can be used to create ticket for that project.

Once 'Raise Ticket' tab is clicked,the following screen shot is visible,where the ticket can be created.

The ticket is created and saved as below.

The ticket is now visible in the detail view of that project as shown below.

Multiple Language Support

vtiger added multiple language support in Customer Portal 5.1.0 .

To add new language support you need to add the language file in /language folder.

Then in the PortalConfig.php file add it to the $language variable, by default we have set English as the default language you can change this to your language by changing $default_language variable in the same file .

If you want the new language as your default language then add this to $default_language.

$default_language = 'de_de';