Getting started

Congratulations on choosing Ainua Portal as your self-service solution!

Once you have obtained the access rights for your portal instance, you can start configuring everything ready for your end-users.

1. Branding
   • Color palette
   • Logo and name
   • Background image
   • Common menu style
2. Introduction page
   • Hero image
   • Header content
3. Pages * n
   • Introduction page clues
   • Hero image
   • Header content
   • Data layouts
   • Data mapping to UI
   • Actions definition
   • Footer content
4. Translations
   • Languages
   • Common translations
   • Pages translations

All this configuration is done without a single line of code via the Ainua Portal administration pages.

Branding

Branding is a one time setup that needs to be done for any new portal deployment. It defines the common styles related to colors and other appearance of the portal.

• Background color or background image respectively
• Portal logo and name
• Portal menu style

Introduction page

Introduction page is a common landing page for portal which idea is to provide information of the portal without a need for user to login first. Thus it does not yet contain any user specific information but it still can give the user an idea of what can be done if he/she decides to go ahead and login.

Introduction page has a common section where admin configures:

• Hero section layout
• Hero image and texts
• Additional textual introduction to the portal

This page shows also a list of all other pages within the portal with clues of what can be done on each of them. This information is configured in each individual pages configuration.

Pages

Pages are the heart and soul of portal build on top of Ainua Portal. These are the entities which are used to show and provide actions to data brought from the back-office solutions. Each page has:

• Hero section layout
• Hero image and texts
• Additional information of the page before the data section
• Actual data from integration with the selected layout and content
• Complementing textual information after the data section

Data

Ainua Portal is implemented upon a “integration first” -principle. This means that when introducing a new page or changes to an existing page we approach it by following these steps:

1. Create a new page (as needed)
   • Using Ainua Portal administration
   • Give the page a page_id
2. Use development mode
   • Change page to development mode using Ainua Portal administration
3. Do the integration
   • Using a workflow tool or other integration method push first data item to page_id
   • -> Available data becomes visible in Ainua Portal administration
   • Configure page data content visual appearance using Ainua Portal administration
4. Return to normal mode
   • Turn page development mode off using the Ainua Portal administration
   • Page becomes available to end-users

Development mode is special state a page can be set to automatically record data coming in from an integration. This simplifies the configuration of data mapping in Ainua Portal end as the admin does not need to remember what data is brought in but instead he/she can just decide what to do with the data from readily prepared list of data.

Admin can also add labels, titles and similar additional content to complement data coming from the integration.

Actions

The second important aspect of Ainua Portal is the bi-directional nature of the data coming from integrations. This is achieved by providing capability to define actions related to data items. Actions can be simple things like jumping to a specific link on a related service, to sending an email when user is requesting some action to be done, to fully integrated interaction with back-office solution using webhooks style callbacks.

Translations

Ainua Portal supports any number of languages for the client side. It is possible to directly use only the texts that have been defined in the configurations, or if multiple languages are needed, extend to defining them and giving necessary translations. Translations are provided via Ainua Portal administration. When languages have been defined the language selection becomes available to client side automatically.

Translations allow also to pick different data source from the integration for different languages. This is useful for example for product names or what ever is different in different language in the back-office as well.