Portal Features In Odoo

The OpenERP Portal module allows you to provide system access to customers or suppliers. It let you show only a part of your OpenERP application without exposing all features of your system. It is a useful module to allow customers, partners, suppliers and other type of external users to use your system for particular tasks.

     A portal defines a specific user menu and access rights for its members. This menu can be seen by portal members, anonymous users and any other user that have the access to technical features (e.g. the administrator). Also, each portal member is linked to a specific partner.

                 Once the portal module is installed, settings related to the portal access will appear in the general settings  menu. There are five options to configure.

Activate the public portal :  The public portal is accessible only if you are in single database mode. You can launch the openERP server with an option “--db-filter=database name” to set single database mode. In that the webclient will work as a public website. That means it will login as  anonymous user whenever the url is accessed through a browser.
When we check the public portal option and save the settings, an anonymous user will be created, who will act as the session user for the URL. If we configure the views for anonymous user and set proper access control, OpenERP features can be accessed by public just like a web site. 

Activate customer portal : In this feature when you send a document to a customer , he  will able to get all the  documents ,company news  when he signup.In this  what will happen is that every email notification sent by user will have a link at the bottom of the email that points to the documents in your OpenERP instance. It will allow any follower (internal user or external contact) to see the document.

Enable Password reset from login page: If checked, it will provide a password reset option in the login page. Once a user clicks that button, an email will be send to the user’s id, which will contain a link to change the login password.

Access Management Feature
  Under the ‘more’ option in a customer form, you will see the ‘Portal access Management’ feature. It basically allows us to grant portal access for customers along with a login. That means new users corresponding to the selected customers will be created.
        We may select which contacts should belong to the portal in the list below. The email address of each selected contact must be valid and unique. If necessary, you can fix any contact's email address directly in the list. 

Data Sharing Feature
  Under the ‘more’ option in a customer form, you will see the ‘Share’ feature .Share feature is used to share some data to a group or external users through mail. Clicking on the link in the email, the user will be able to access the shared document.
Data sharing features are of four type.

• Direct link or embed code : This share option will help to create a link and embed code using this link we can share document .By access mode we can also specify access rights for those who use the link
• Email : This share option will help to share document to any one’s email at that time openERP will create that particular user using that email .In that email all login information along with the link that redirect to the related to document will also given.
• Users you already shared with : This share  option will help to share to the user those who are already shared.
• Existing Groups :  Using this share option we can share the document to a particular group.