View source for Theme Cosmos - Persona-specific Portal Configuration

{{Design pattern|Title=Theme Cosmos - Persona-specific portal configuration|Description=Configure portal access by personas and permissions|Version=8.5|Applications=Pega Platform|Capability Area=User Experience|Owner=Prabhu, abhay}}

Portals are highly configurable interfaces that let you define how users will interact with your application. Users can be typically grouped together as personas based on the responsibilities that they assume and the tasks that they can perform. Therefore, it is very important to carefully present to users only the functionality that they need to fulfill their responsibilities, based on their personas.

== Use case examples ==
In a banking application the customers typically interact with an agent in the front office who is responsible for onboarding customers. The onboarding cases are then reviewed by the manager and forwarded to the users in the relevant departments to perform the required checks and complete the onboarding. In addition, the manager also has to monitor his team’s performance. The agent and back-office user only needs limited functionality to fill out the initial details and start the case, but the manager needs additional functionality to review, redirect and report. The functionality that can be accessed by a persona is primarily defined by the application portal itself, which defines the set of landing pages and features that the user can access.

== Process ==
There are two steps to specifying the portal that each persona can access in the application: 
# In the navigation pane of App Studio, in the '''Channels''' section, open a portal and navigate to the configuration tab. Add as many personas to the portal as you need for your application. 
# In the navigation pane of App Studio, on the '''Access''' Landing page, in the '''Users''' section, choose the portals that each persona will need access to. 
In general, personas can only be configured to have access to end user portals, such as Case Manager or Case Worker. However, if you need a persona to have access to developer portals, such as App Studio or Dev Studio, you can do so by logging into the application as a developer, locating the access group corresponding to that persona, and adding the required portals in the '''Available portal''' section of the access group definition.

== One portal for many personas ==
Each portal consists of different landing pages that includes features such as reports, a calendar, and more. 

It is recommended that you create one portal with all the pages that the application and its personas will need, and then configure the personas to have access to only the landing pages that they require access to. You do this on the '''Access''' Landing page, in the '''Users''' section of the App Studio navigation pane.

This ensures a consistent user experience for all the personas that access the same pages in a portal. However, if the functionality needed by the personas is vastly different, you can also choose to create multiple different portals for the persona.

== One or multiple portals for a single persona ==
When designing an application, you may require that a persona, for example a super user, has access to features that a manager would access, as well as those that a back-office user needs. There are two possible ways of addressing this need: 
# If the portals and the personas are close enough, you can create one portal that has all the landing pages, and then configure the Super User persona to use this new portal. At the same time, you can also set the other personas to use the same portal and configure their access to the required landing pages as described above.
# If the function of the portals is very different, and the portals cannot be merged together, you can a configure a single persona to have access to multiple portals. For example, an admin user may need access to the Manager, User, Admin, and Developer portals, which are very different in the purpose that they meet and thus cannot be merged.
You can configure multiple portals for a persona by opening the individual portals form the channels section or in the access landing page by ticking the portals that the persona needs access to. In this scenario, you must choose a default portal for the persona that the user sees when they log in. The user can then choose to switch between the portals as necessary, and gain access to the pages presented by those portals.

== Additional documentation ==
Please refer to the following articles on Pega Community for more information on persona-specific portal configurations:
* [https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/application-development/85/associating-personas-channels Associating personas with channels]
* [https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/user-experience/85/providing-persona-based-access-portal Providing persona-based access to a portal]