Customizing Menu Items in Applications

Transcript:

In this video, we're going to learn how to create and manage Menu Applications within CloudRadial. These helpful links can serve as bookmarks and other quick reference links to make your clients more productive, all while giving them another key reason to use the portal.

Let's ask the usual question, why should you take the time to set these up? Because MSPs and clients alike use a multitude of tools that can be confusing and overwhelming access. Plus, with the rise of work from home, there's a definite need for an online portal to access key applications and websites that a business uses.

In short, it can make it easier for clients to work with you because of ease of access to critical apps and services, such as your billing portal, and or it can be used to help them access their own critical line of business apps and services. In either case, it certainly gives users a reason to start their day within the portal.

Like all types of content, you can create them either on the company level as a one-off or within the partner and content area for quicker and more scalable distribution.

For the sake of this video's example, we'll head straight to Company and Applications within the Feature Set. Or we would ordinarily, but I've actually got the Applications Set as my home page.

In my case, I'll head straight to the Home tab at the top of the Feature Set. We can see a few of them here on the screen now.

They're broken apart by categories, as seen here.

The categories are organized in alphabetical order, so keep that in mind as you build out your menu application options.

You can quickly toggle between the menu view and the list view by using the options to the right of the search bar.

And speaking of, you can use that search bar to find any application links that you need to access. Let's add a new application to see what options we have.

We'll use the Add button at the top to create a new one.

Here, we'll have the option to place them within their own category, or add them to an existing one. We can also name the application what we like and point it to where it needs to go within the URL field.

These menu applications also have a few additional interesting functions. Selecting the Show More Options button will show the two additional options.

One is to open the selected link within an iframe directly within the portal. That can be a fantastic way to keep people in the portal as they access their links. But keep in mind that only you select number of sites and services, allow for themselves to work in an iframe, so be sure to test anything out before putting it in front of clients.

You've also got the secondary option to open the URL to a different link if the link is used within CloudRadial's desktop application. We'll cover this in greater detail when we explore the desktop application in a future video, but here's an example of how it can work. Within the cloud-based version of the portal, you want the URL to go to the online version of Microsoft Word, so you enter the URL here.

But when they use that link within the desktop app, you want it to actually open their Word program. Because the desktop application runs on the local computer level, it can recognize and open links to file paths. The cloud version of CloudRadial cannot. It just doesn't have the permission to force open paths. programs. 

Other options below include some design elements such as icons, tool tip text, and whether or not the content is editable by partners.

There's an advanced use case option for the application menu to be used in the service home page. This option can turn your icons into bigger, more prominent icons that highlight themselves on the home page alongside your knowledge base articles.

For the sake of brevity, we'll cover how to accomplish that specifically in another video. Because the content is being created on the Company Level, we also have the secondary tab to choose the user groups that it's published to. If you don't edit this tab at all, CloudRadial will default to publishing the content to everyone within the company.

There are a few key things that you can also do within this area of the feature set that are unique. For starters, you can select the settings option as a user in this area and define your own wallpaper. Another great option to boost portal adoption by making it feel more like their own home. These options are definable per user.

Also, users can right-click on any one of the application menus and choose to pin it to their favorites.

Doing so will not only add them to the top of their screen for that specific user's view, but it will also allow them to appear in the quick app access menu, which is available anywhere in the portal. To access it, you simply need to click on the grid at the very top left of your portal. This is just another useful UI tactic to make the clients feel more at home so that they adopt their portal as their home base.

Lastly, let's go check out applications within the content area. Off to partner and content we go. Menu applications will appear under the menu section of the content packages.

These will behave just like they did on the company level, so if you're comfortable with them in one place, you'll be comfortable with them in another. The key difference is that creating them with their partner > content will allow you to distribute them to more companies at a much more scalable and faster rate.

Sometimes that'll be a good thing, but other times you'll want to add in applications for clients as one-offs. Menu applications have a tendency to be highly subjective, so it's normal to have them be a bit more disorganized and organize in other forms of content. A final tidbit of information that you should know. Basic users can always have the option to create their own application menus, even with the lowest possible permissions within Cloud Radial.

The applications that they create will be strictly for themselves on their own application page. Encouraging users to add to their portal and make it more effective can only improve the client experience and the stickiness between your MSP and their business.

Helpful Links:

Company Groups Video: https://youtu.be/DIq1Vzc2n_o

User Groups Video: https://youtu.be/32Xt7f72QQk

Feature Sets Video: https://youtu.be/zrFNP5QX4Qw