Customizing the SSP's home page
Introduced in 2021.1
The Self Service Portal home page provides quick access to all information and tasks available for your customers. This article describes what the home page contains and explains how to customize the home page's appearance.
The home page consists of a large search box for searching the knowledge base and a grid of elements for everything your customers would need for self-serve, including buttons for submitting tickets and asking questions, and collapsible widgets for quick access to their open tickets, latest activities, and other information. The appearance of the home page is defined by the home page's template.
The home page's template controls these visual aspects of the Self Service Portal:
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Layout: The home page's layout defines how many columns the home page has, i.e. the layout of the home page elements (buttons and widgets) under the search box.
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Theme: The color theme defines the overall look, feel and style of the home page and the whole Self Service Portal and has a direct impact on your customers' experience.
The Self Service Portal comes with a package of beautiful home page's templates. For example, the default "Ocean Depth" template results in a three-column home page with vivid colors, as shown below. You can change the template to easily customize how your Self Service Portal looks and feels.
NOTE: The actual content of the home page depends on the SSP scope, i.e. the Alloy Navigator modules that the administrator selected when configuring the portal. Installation Guide: Defining the Self Service Portal's Scope.
To change the home page's template:
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On the web server hosting the Self Service Portal, launch the Web Configuration tool (for example, from the Alloy Control Panel).
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Navigate to the Self Service Portal using the sidebar. Typically, it is installed into the "hd" virtual directory.
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Under Features on the right hand side, click Configure. The Configure Self Service Portal wizard starts.
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Navigate to the Home Page page and click the down arrow to open the drop down list with the available templates.
Switch between templates until you are satisfied. The preview pane reflects the chosen template.
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Select the desired template and click Next.
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Complete the wizard to apply the new template.
You can always revert to the defaults by choosing the default template.
TIP: You can even create custom templates if needed. The Self Service Portal stores its home page templates in the [PhysicalPathToSSP]\HomePage\ directory. Start with copying the contents of a folder for one of the existing templates (the best choice is the default one) into a new folder inside that directory, make your customizations, and then apply your custom template using the Web Configuration tool. Note that building SSP home page templates requires some programming and design skills and a strong understanding of LESS (which stands for Leaner Style Sheets), a language extension for CSS.