Creating External Web Portals

Learn how to create an external Web Portal that is accessible for people outside of WSC users.
Reference Guide
The Statistics Overview is great for showing the statistics for a survey, but has limitations:
  • Only WSC users have access to the overview - external stakeholders have no access
  • All questions and statistics are shown - you can't exclude certain questions for example
What is need is a way to view the parts of the Overview you want view, and allow this view to be accessible to people outside of WSC users.

What is a Web Portal?

From the perspective of WSC, a Web Portal can be thought of as a "view" of some or all of the content available in the Statistics Overview.

A Web portal differs from the Statistics Overview in the following ways:
  • A Web Portal is accessible to people who are not users of WSC
  • The Web Portal theme and layout borrow from the theme and layout you have used for your Web Survey
The content in the Statistics Overview is fixed, whereas the Web Portal content is configurable:
  • A "Home Page" for instructions and other details can appear at the front of the portal
  • You choose which survey overview charts to show - some, all or none
  • You choose which survey question statistics to show, some, all or none
  • Only one chart is shown on screen at once (isn't tied to the page structure of the survey)

Creating a Web Portal

  • 1. From the survey designer, navigate to Analysis --> Portals, click on the Create Portal icon to create a new portal. Create Portal
    Survey Portals Create Portal
  • 2. Use the list of available checkboxes to select specific sections that you want to be available in your Survey Portal.
    Survey Portals Sections
  • 3. Portal menu and content text can be personalised. Portal text content is compatible with Content Tags to assist with formatting and images.
    Survey Portals Text Content
  • 4. To save your portal settings, scroll to the bottom of the page and select the Update Portal Options button.

Closing a Portal

There may be times when you don't want anyone in the portal. This could be because:
  • The project has ended and the portal should no longer be accessed
  • You don't want the portal accessed until a certain time/date (eg... give a client access on day 3, when there will be some valid data in the survey)
  • You need to make modifications to the survey or the portal, and you don't want people using it
The Portal Open Settings allow you to:
  • 1. Open the portal (the default state)
  • 2. Close the portal
  • 3. Open at a specific time/date
  • 4. Close at a specific time/date
Survey Portals Close and Open

Creating Multiple Portals

There is no limit to the number of portals you can create for a single survey. The idea is to create an additional portal for each type of person who needs access to it.

Each portal you create has a unique link generated for it that can not be guessed, and therefore is secure as long as you only send it to the people who need it. For example, a portal link could be:

http://portal.websurveycreator.com/p.aspx?p=4528e4df-75cc-4ffe-ba31-d59cd6602f4b&lang=en&t=h

The portal is identified with the identifier:

4528e4df-75cc-4ffe-ba31-d59cd6602f4b

Every portal is given a completely different identifier, so no one except the right people can get in.