Overview of Client Portal and Taskfire Internal Help Desk

Introduction

The Client Portal is a secure, branded web portal through which your clients can access some of their data in your Autotask instance. It allows you and your customers to collaborate on tickets, projects, and user management. In the portal, clients can:

  • submit and monitor the status of their tickets
  • grant approvals for change requests
  • work on their assigned project tasks and monitor the status of their projects
  • read selected articles and documents in your Autotask knowledge base
  • run reports and view their invoices

You deploy Client Portal to end clients who do not have to manage their own internal help desk or IT department.

Taskfire is an extension to the Client Portal. It provides a secure, private, interactive service desk for your clients’ internal IT staff that is integrated with your own Autotask instance.

  • Your clients can complete tickets themselves or escalate them to you when internal IT resources are unavailable or lack expertise.
  • Tickets can be transferred between you and the client
  • Your clients can even use Taskfire to escalate tickets to other vendors, using email if those vendors lack Autotask.
  • Taskfire supports sharing work, service request templates, queues, and vendors between parent organizations and sub-organizations.
  • You can set up Taskfire to automatically bill your clients for Taskfire licenses.
  • The clients' Taskfire administrators can manage users, add queues, control the flow of tickets (which queue they go to and when they should be escalated to you for analysis and work), and configure other key business settings.

You activate Taskfire when the client has an internal service department or IT department, and you need to coordinate which tickets will be handled internally and which tickets will be escalated to you.

We are currently working on the next generation of the Client Portal. You have the option to enable early access to the new version and activate it for selected clients. These clients will see a button at the top of Client Portal pages that allow them to switch to the new version or switch back to the current version.

Refer to Enable Early Access.

Client Portal is included with the Premium and Ultimate Autotask subscriptions.

Taskfire is an optional feature that you can activate yourself and enable for selected customers. For each individual Taskfire user license, you will incur a fee. You can automatically bill your clients for this fee using a recurring service contract. You can activate Taskfire on the > Admin > Admin Categories > Activations page. Refer to Activations.

For more information about Client Portal features, refer to Viewing the Client Portal end user documentation, or contact your account manager.

You can also enable Client Portal and Taskfire at no cost for users at your local organization. This will allow you to demo the portal to your clients.

Customizing and branding your Client Portal

Except for the activation of individual client contacts which you can delegate to a Client Portal Manager at the client company, the generic Client Portal is ready to use. But since the Client Portal will represent you to your clients, we recommend you spend some time to:

  • add your logo to the login page and the portal itself
  • customize the look and feel of the portal
  • configure the workflow between you and your clients

There are two levels of customization and configuration:

  • You can configure global settings that will apply to all portal instances, for example global authentication settings and portal security levels.
  • You can then modify many of these settings at the client level.

Refer to ADMIN: Configuring the Client Portal.