Administration Guide

Customizing the SSP home page

Deprecated in 2021

NOTE: This article describes deprecated functionality that only works with Alloy Navigator 8.7 and earlier. For up-to-date functionality, see Customizing the SSP's home page.

When SSP customers sign in to the Self Service Portal, they land on the Home page. The Home page consists of portlets. Portlets are rectangular display components of the portal, that are used to organize important information and provide access to various objects and actions on the Home page.

The following portlets are on the Home page by default:

  • Tools — provides access to all Self Service Portal objects and actions;

  • Latest Updates — displays most recently updated Incidents and Equipment Reservations. It also displays Approval Requests that are waiting for the user's decision, if applicable;

  • Announcements — displays active Announcements created for SSP users;

  • Popular Articles — displays most often viewed articles from the Knowledge Base;

  • Popular Service Catalog Items — displays most requested items from the Service Catalog.

You can hide or add portlets or configure what information they display. For example, you can create a portlet to display top 5 most recent articles from a particular Knowledge Base category. The number of articles and the order in which they are displayed can be customized.

In addition to the default portlets, you can create a custom portlet displaying content from a web page or from a local HTML file.

By default, portlets are arranged in two columns. You can add more columns or reorder portlets within a column.

To make any customizations, you need to edit the WelcomePage.config file and configure its parameters as explained further. This file is located in the config folder under the folder where your Alloy Navigator Self Service Portal files are located: [PhysicalPathToSSP]\config\WelcomePage.config.

The [PhysicalPathToSSP] is the placeholder for the physical path to the installation folder of your Self Service Portal.

NOTE: For instruction on viewing the physical path of Self Service Portal installation folder, see Physical Path to Self Service Portal Files.