Issues with customer portal

1

Last year @lubos announced customer portals which is very excellete feature.

But it need some updates, there are few minor issues with it.

1. Custom field column not showing

I have a custom field which is also showing as column in sales quotes and sales invoices. However same column is not showing in customer portals.

2. Print Layout and PDF button.

Print button is available in customer portals but layout is not same as we use normally, for example if i want to print or create PDF fron print option, layout is different from regular print layout. its like boxed layout instead of full width, i checked on 2 browsers.

Also, Even if we have enabled PDF option, it not showing when some quote/invoice is accessed frm customer portal.

2

if you read the development well and why the PDF button became obsolete is because the alternative was supposed to be these insecure Customer portals. Until to date I think that @Lubos needs to rethink this, especially the PDF button but I posted enough on this in other topics. So just accept that there will definitely not be a PDf button in Customer portal. If anything that development seems dead also because of insecurity that we were all concerned about.

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3

I don’t think the customer portal will ever be ready for use. Unfortunately, this program developer does have a tendency to start something and never finish it. The customer portal is really not ready for production use ad I would not advise using it as it has no security whatsoever, never mind the fact that clients cannot download a pdf invoice, rendering the portal totally useless for my needs.

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4

Is Customer portal really available through Desktop version? I have an option to create it for my customers but I’m getting only local host address like 127.0.0.1:…etc and can’t be open outside my computer.

Thank You

5

Customer portal won’t work in desktop edition because there is no way for outside customers to actually access it.

6

But why is there an option within the program?

7

That is the compromise one has when using the free version of Manager … to gain the full functionality of Manager I’d recommend the paid Cloud version.

8

Fair point.
It maybe better if the program showed a warning on the desktop version.

Personally I have a server version and do not allow remote internet access by design. The security risk of exposing my accounting system to the entire web just so I can email payslips is a terrible compromise for a functionally worse solution. Receiving an emailed payslip is far better than receiving a web link. And even then a pdf document provides far better control of a businesses image than a web page which varies with browser and window size.

Imo the only real value of customer portal is to harvest data from customers.

  • Order placement, acceptance, tracking (ie overt legitimate tracking but I’m not sure this is the place of accounting software).
  • Cloud provider harvesting users client data for direct or indirect on sale (ie same business model as Google, Facebook, Microsoft)

So no positive value for my use case.

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