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Publishing to the portal
↩ Portal
Nothing reaches the portal by default. Two separate controls decide what your users see, and both live in the main console rather than in the portal itself — which is why they're easy to miss.
Knowledge base articles
An article has two portal settings, on the article itself:
- Publish to portal — a checkbox. Until it's ticked, the article does not exist as far as the portal is concerned.
- Audience — End-user or Technical. The portal's knowledge base shows end-user articles by default.
An article that's published to the portal carries an On portal badge in the console, so you can tell at a glance.
"Published" and "published to the portal" are different things. An article's status of Published means it's finalised for your team. It does not put the article in front of portal users. That takes the separate checkbox above. If you've wondered why customers can't see an article you published, this is why.
Use the audience setting deliberately. A runbook that assumes console access, or names internal hostnames, belongs on Technical — where it stays out of the portal's default view.
Services on the status page
A service has a show on portal flag. Only services with it set appear on the portal's service status page.
This is what keeps your status page meaningful. Without it, either everything in your estate is exposed to everyone who can sign in, or nothing is. Pick the handful of services your users actually recognise and care about — the ones they'd ring you about — and show those.
A sensible starting point
- Turn on the two or three services your users name when something's wrong.
- Publish a small number of end-user articles covering your most repeated questions.
- Leave everything else unpublished, and add to it as patterns emerge in your tickets.
Notes & tips
- Review what's published occasionally. A stale status page or an out-of-date article is worse than an empty one, because people act on it.
- If a change approver can't see a change in the portal, that's board membership rather than publishing — changes aren't published, they route. See Change advisory boards and change types.