A Quick Overview of Content

Welcome to one of the most important lessons in CloudRadial usage, Content. In this video, you'll learn how to create, edit, target, and deploy content.

Content includes articles, tickets (forms), planner cards, and more to the appropriate clients within your portal. Just like a PSA platform like ConnectWise and AutoTask is multi-client friendly, so is CloudRadial as a CSA. Through content manipulation, it's possible for every company and even every user to have a unique portal customized to their needs, along with feature sets and company groups (and user groups).

Content makes up the last of the Core Pillars of how to set up and use the portal. Understanding how to use content means you'll have a hyper scalable portal that can be updated and changed on the fly. In short, mastering it means you can respond to clients needs quickly for seamless customer experience, all without taking up any internal company resources, like your employees and their time.

• Understanding the Partner > Content Page
• Creating Content
• Deleting Content
• Archiving Content
• Managing and Publishing Content
  

Understanding the Partner > Content Page

To start, let’s head over to Partner > Content within the Feature Set.
Here we can get an eye on all the sample content that's been preloaded in the portal for you already. Each type of content you create is broken down into its own section, like articles, assessment, templates, courses and more.

Next, each section is an indicator that let's you know at a glance where the information is located within the Feature Set. We can see the adding articles would end up displaying within a company’s Company > Knowledge Base area.

Each one of the items that you see in each section are what we call Content Packages; in essence folders that hold the content of the section says they hold.

• Portal information, is the name of the content package.
• Subscribers, are the number of client companies that can currently see the content of that content package within their portal.
• Items, shows you how many pieces of content there are in the package. In this instance, there's only one article in this package. (There is no known limit to how many pieces of content can exist within a content package.)
• User add, let's you know whether that content can be enabled or disabled by a company admin.
• Last publish, let's you know the last time edits were made to the contents of that content package
• Status, will you know if the content within that package is published and live or not. Those that are not live will display unpublished in the color orange, which we'll see later.
• Source will show you where the content came from, partner which is you or sample content, which means it came from the system. All partner and sample content is yours to do with what you please.
• User groups, show you what type of user's eligible to see the content within their portal. By default, you'll start with two groups, everyone and admin.
• Company Groups, is the trigger that tells CloudRadial, which companies are eligible to receive the content within the package.

You're likely going to be adding content to your portal as you expand it; filling up the portal with customized content makes for a rich experience that showcases your MSPs intellectual property. The more quality custom content you add, the more value users get out of the resources. That all helps to improve your portal retention and usage rates, in general. 

Creating Content

Select +add at the top right to add a brand new Content Package.

•  First up, we'll need to pick the Content Type let's choose Articles
  
  
• Then we'll give this content package a name. This will be client visible. You can call it whatever you like. As usual, we recommend something simple to help organize the portal as clean as possible. For example, Office 365 Usage Articles.
  
  
• Next, you have the choice of targeting the folder in the contents for specific user group. As stated earlier, there are two by default, Everyone and Admin. We'll stick to those two choices for today, but later on, as you get more familiar with user groups, you can get more precise.
  
  Every user in the portal is part of the Everyone group, so anyone in the portal will be able to see these articles. But if you were to choose Admin, it would only be visible to those within the admin user group that usually means specific points of contact in a client company.
  
• Description, supplement the title, If it wasn't enough, or if you want to add notes to the folder, feel free to leave it blank unless you have a specific reason otherwise.
• Other Settings, For now, we're going to skip the optional checkboxes. These are advanced settings that we'll cover later that have to do with specific use cases for pushing out content packages.
  Important thing to take away here is the column that decides which Company Groups to send the content to.
  
  In a previous lesson on Company Groups, we learned how to create and put companies within those groups. This is where they're applied to make structured data management a breeze.
  
• We can simply drag over the Office 365 group.
  
• The content package is ready. It will be a folder of Office articles, set to be visible to every user, within the Office 365 Company Group. Let's press the Submit button.
  
  
• Now all there's left to do is actually create the articles as many or as few as we want.
  
  You can see the article in the package display is unpublished even though it's created. It's not going to be visible to everyone just yet. In fact, if we leave this package, we can see that the content area reminds us that there are changes that are not yet public.
  

Let's get back in there. To push it out, we simply need to hit the Publish button at the top.

Now, CloudRadial is going through and pushing the contents of this package out to the right Users and Companies. Those that match the User and Company Groups of Everyone and Office 365, our very own company should be part of that group. So let's go see if it worked.
Nice, it has. We can also see how long it took to complete the publishing job by going to Alerting > Jobs.

We saw this area once before in the video about sync processes. The jobs area also captures the publish times. Publishing jobs can take a few minutes depending on the time of day and the amount of data being published.

Let's head back to Partner > Content. We recommend using Company Groups as a way to push content out because it makes it super easy and scalable to manage your Content.

There are instances where you want to push content to a specific client or number of clients without needing to use groups. For example, let's say you wanted to create a Content Package of
Articles, specifically for one single client. Let's make a new content package of articles just for our own company.

• Create it just like last time, except this time we'll purposely leave the company groups section blank.
  
• Once the folder is created, we'll  .
• Next, we'll select Settings the top of the package. This page is a simple overview that shows some stats of the content package.
  
  
• For our purposes of pushing the content out to a specific company, we're really only interested in Subscribers tab at the top left without using groups. We can cherry pick the companies that get to have.
  
  This content this isn't something we advise you to do when you first start, because you can lose track of which company's getting what. Content publisher pretty quickly. But it's important to know that it exists and you can choose to publish content to specific companies whenever.
  
  
• Like last time we used the publish option to get the content pushed out to the company.

Back in the main overview of content you can see the downside of this. Well, it works perfectly.
It's not apparent to see who this content package is being published to. If you do choose to publish with this method, make sure that your content package name is clear with who it's targeting.

If you're still watching, give yourself a pat on the back. Content is a critical concept of grasp and there's lot to it, but it's super important to understand so that you can push your content out in a way that scales with as many clients as you want to add to the portal.

Deleting Content

Keeping your content area clean and easy to navigate is the key to making it approachable and manageable.

• To delete an entire content package, you first need to select it,
• Then select the Settings to the top.
• Here you can delete the content package using the red trash can on the top. Doing so will delete the package and everything in it. This action is final and can't easily be reverted. Make sure that you're sure that you delete the content package before doing so
  

To delete a specific piece of content:

• select individual content items
• select the trash at the top

Doing so puts in the status of deletion. Publishing the content will finalize the deletion. If you made a mistake and want to bring it back, simply click on it and click the Restore option.
This will cancel the deletion entirely for that piece of content.

Archiving Content

If the permanent nature of deletion make you uncomfortable, there's always another option. You can archive content packages. Doing so will place them in a status out of the way of the main content, but can still be recovered any time. This is ideal for content that isn't needed at the moment, but may come in handy later.

• To archive content click on the settings option within a content package
• use the archive option at the bottom right. Archive content will act as if it's deleted, it will disappear from the main partner content overview and it'll be removed from the view of anyone that was subscribed to it.
  
  

In the main area, you'll notice a tab at the top named Archived. Selecting this tab will show you that your portal comes with every single content package you start with backed up for you plus anything else that you sent back here, such as a folder that was archived.

To bring back archived content:

• select it
• use the save as function to make a copy of it.
  
  This copy of the content package will be placed back into the active contact area; It can be manipulated just like before.

Managing and Publishing Content

If you're just starting out your content area will look a lot like this.

Despite the fact there are many content packages out there, they're not actually targeted at any specific companies just yet. As a final training step, let's learn how to take an existing sample content package and push it out to an audience. You want to do this for all your sample content as you decide what's worth keeping what's worth modifying and what's worth deleting.

• Select the folder Portal Information
• Now scrutinize the contents of this folder and make any changes
• Next select the S ettings here, but this time we're going to go straight to editing content package here.
  
• Drag All from the Available Groups section to Selected
  
  The only changes I need to make is targeting the content package to the appropriate company group since it's generic on how to use the portal, sending it to all seems appropriate.
• Select submit
• Publish it out just like we did before

You'll want to take the time to look at your content when your first starting out to choose what Company Groups you get what Content. Here's an example of a mature content section can look like within a tenant.

It can't be stressed enough how important managing content like this is. This structure is what allows you to make changes to hundreds upon thousands of users with just a few button clicks. This in turn is going to change the way you empower clients and the content you create.

Other useful Knowledge Base Articles:
Understanding and Managing Company Groups – CloudRadial

Understanding and Changing Feature Sets – CloudRadial

Setting Different Home Pages – CloudRadial