How to build your own white-label employee portal - a step by step tutorial

In this article, I will lead you step by step through building an employee portal in HyperOffice. HyperOffice is one of the most well known intranet solutions in the market positioned as a “Sharepoint Alternative”, giving organizations a simpler and more modern interface to build robust portals. As you will see, you only need minimal familiarity with internet software to achieve this.

Enough foreword. Let’s get started.

Here are the main steps we will go through:

1. Account creation: Set up your free HyperOffice account.
2. Employee portal features: Review the items and collaboration features you can add to your portal
3. Employee portal setup: Learn to create and display collaboration tools and elements on your portal
4. Creating workspaces and users: Create users and manage their access permissions.

1. Account creation

Go to the signup page and fill a form with basic info about your company.

Now, set up your account and pick a portal sub-domain.

Immediately, you will receive a confirmation email, as shown below:

 

As soon as you click on the “verify your email” button, you are ready to set up our employee portal. The simplest option is to just start using the default experience - a centralized team space which gives your team access to various collaboration and productivity tools like shared calendars, document libraries, project management etc.

However, many companies want a greater degree of customization, where the employee portal fulfills other objectives beyond collaboration like making important announcements, recognizing achievers, disseminating company culture etc. You have the option of designing such custom experiences by clicking on the “design” option.

You have the option of starting with a blank template, or select from a library of pre built templates for your specific needs. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will select the “Vanilla” template.

As soon as you select a template, you are taken to the Publisher, which lets you just drag and drop elements you can use to create a highly customized employee portal.

2. Employee portal features

The Publisher gives you access to a wide variety of widgets to add to your employee portal.

• Agenda: Vreate events and assign a deadline or date.
• Link an item: Access any HyperOffice feature by just clicking an element.
• Calendar: Display a team calendar on your portal.
• Files: Display files in the document management system on your portal homepage.
• Workspace selector: In HyperOffice, you can create multiple workspaces for each team or department. You can use this widget to allow your team members to navigate to specific workspaces.
• Links: A list a set of custom links to access any URL.
• Tasks: Show important team tasks including deadlines, who is responsible, priority etc.
• Wiki: Post announcements, team news, articles etc.

You don’t have to create a task, file, agenda or Atlas element when you are creating the portal homepage. HyperOffice automatically pulls these items from specific sections - documents, project management, scheduling etc, and displays an aggregated view on your portal homepage.

Object & Design widgets:

You might want to completely customize the look and feel of your portal to convey your brand identity and emphasize some elements over others. The object widgets let you create a completely customized internal website.

• Button: Display a button you can link to any URL, intranet element or Atlas module.
• Contact Form: Create a simple form with defined fields: subject and message. Choose an email to send the information.
• Embed Site: Choose any website, and just by adding the URL, display an embedded version of this site inside your portal.
• Google Maps: Show a specific location through Google maps.
• HTML: Add an HTML block with HTML and JS code.
• Site Menu: Your Portal can have multiple levels of pages with interlinking. Use the site navigation to simplify navigation between these pages.
• Add an image: Add PNG/JPG images
• Slideshow: Show a set of photos as a slideshow.
• Text Block: Add titles or paragraphs of custom text. Edit size, font, colors, and format.
• Custom panel: Separate your content through panels.
• Grid: display a set of photos with a grid format.
• Horizontal Line: Separate your content vertically through horizontal lines
• Strip: Add a section for your page. A great way to structure each page of your intranet.
• Vertical Line: Separate the content displayed in the same section through vertical lines.

 

3. Configuring modules

Each module has its own configuration options, depending on your requirements. For example, you would drag and drop the calendar module if you want to display information about important team events.

 

You are then presented with some options, for example whether you want to display events for just that specific workspace, or all events across workspaces.

This will embed the Calendar view in your workspace. Next, you just need to drag and drop to choose the position and size of your calendar.

Another example is the documents module. You can even display files from specific folders if you like.

Now you can display your documents on your portal so your employees can access relevant content whenever they want. These documents are automatically synched with the document management section in your HyperOffice account. Whether you edit or delete documents in the documents section, the changes are instantly reflected on your portal homepage.

4. Workspaces & users

While you just worked on the organization-wide employee portal, you can even create similar experiences for every team, office, department or even customers. Each workspace has its own set of members, and information access can be fine tuned according to the roles and responsibilities of each member using multi layered permissions. To create a new workspace, just go to the user’s drop-down menu and choose “Admin”.

You are taken to the admin section. Here, you see current workspaces and assigned users for each workspace.

Click on “New workspace”.

Then, give your new workplace a name, a description and give access to specific users.

If you are a large organization with a lot of users, you can simply drag and drop users to specific workspaces.

In each workspace, you have multiple configuration options: