How to build a Customer Portal with Enonic
Enonic is not just used for building eminent websites—developers can also build apps, e-commerce, and customer portals with the platform. Let’s take a look at the latter.
Written by Morten Eriksen on
If you are considering Enonic as your next-generation platform for digital experiences, you might ask whether you can create a single source of customer information to be presented through different channels—in the form of a customer portal.
According to Helpshift, a customer portal is “designed to give current customers access to services and information they need. It’s usually private and secure, requiring log-on.”
As such, the portal may include “account information, payment information, case information, account history, downloadable digital files, access to support mechanisms, and the means for customers to upload information.”
Therefore, a customer portal is essentially “a digital sharing mechanism and information center between a company or organization and its customers.”
Now, the answer to the introductory question is yes. You can build a customer portal with Enonic—to act as a funnel, where the portal collects data from multiple sources before acting as the single source for information. And as such, Enonic is both open and will support future growth.
Let’s see how.
Access management and ID providers
The Enonic platform ships with a clearly defined and pluggable concept for handling authentication and authorization. Our identity and access management includes logical and easily understood concepts like users, groups, and roles, with several built-in roles coming out of the box.
The NoSQL storage also supports fine-grained access control mechanisms, which enables a maximal control over access and rights. As for identity providers, you can use providers from Enonic Market or build your own.
Editorial content
The Enonic platform features an intuitive, responsive, and powerful content management interface called Content Studio, with a hierarchical tree structure of all your content items providing a neat overview.
The management of a any type of portal, be it a customer or a knowledge portal, needs a user interface and a logical structure. With Content Studio you can of course build websites, create engaging experiences, and reuse content in any channel using our headless APIs.
Read more: Enonic Content Studio cheat sheet »
JavaScript MVC Framework
Enonic provides a server-side JavaScript MVC framework for application development. The framework features a rails-like concept for faster development and less complexity.
Our goal is to enable developers of any language—PHP, .net, Java, Python, and so on—to quickly grasp and be productive with the Enonic platform.
Customisable API
We provide a wide range of standard APIs and interfaces to build and integrate whatever services you require for your customer portal. Examples include the storage API, the caching API, and the content API.
You can also build your own APIs using our MVC framework and libraries like the GraphQL library.
See also: Static site generators and Enonic »
Flexible data storage
The embedded NoSQL data storage is inspired by features from file systems, SQL, Git, and search engines. Our storage provides hierarchy, access control mechanisms, binary support, branches, document-orientation, and powerful search capabilities. Data persisted in Enonic XP can be managed through various applications and interfaces.
Search across different sources
With the enterprise search solution Enonic Explorer you can collect data from custom sources and use a search admin interface for tuning and management. Enonic Explorer also lets you build custom search interfaces for your users.
A customer portal can draw upon several advantages with such a search solution, by making the customer information more available, retrieving the data fast from multiple sources, and customizing the retrieval and presentation of the data.
Read more: Unlock your data with the Enonic Explorer enterprise search »
Open source
Enonic is highly committed to open source and open standards, and you can visit our projects on GitHub to get valuable insights. In addition, commercial licensing is available for subscription customers.
The advantages of an open-source platform is the continuous testing and development of the product by engaged developers. The main advantage, however, is that any day-to-day changes to the code and the code quality is 100% transparent. This ensures predictability and safety for the users and customers. With us, there is no security through obscurity.
Flexible hosting
Your solutions can be deployed to the Enonic Cloud, your own preferred cloud or even on-premise as software. Whatever security requirements your organization has for your customer portal, and whatever skillset you have or lack in terms of DevOps, the flexibility of the Enonic platform will ensure that you can get the best option.
See also: 10 reasons to choose Enonic Cloud »
Security
Enonic treats security with the highest degree of seriousness. As your relationship with your customers rests on secure handling and management of their data, the provider of your customer data platform should live up to the highest standards.
Enonic is ISO 27001:2013 and ISO 9001:2015 certified, fully GDPR compliant, and uses a global CDN to protect against DDoS attacks. Together with our transparency policy, testing regime, vulnerability management, pluggable authentication, permissions and access management, and audits, we believe Enonic is fully battle-hardened and ready to protect your and your customers’ data.
More features
- Backoffice tools: The Enonic platform enables developers to extend the admin console with custom functionality at predefined locations.
- Integration libraries: Libraries are bundles of functionality that can be reused across applications, which can be helpful for a customer portal.
- Java integrations: JavaScript developers may directly invoke and use Java-based code, since the Enonic runtime builds on the JVM.
The Enonic platform does not lack features and flexibility to cater to the needs of your customer portal. Resilient, customizable, and open source, Enonic is suitable for everything from single websites and intranets to complex enterprise solutions. Enonic also features custom support plans and an active community, which can further help any project get off its feet.
