A business's customers and vendors are outside its system, but they have a genuine interest in things within it. The portal gives them controlled access. This piece explains the Odoo customer and vendor portal.
What a portal is
A portal, in Odoo, is a way of giving someone outside the business, a customer, a vendor, controlled, limited access to the part of the system that concerns them, without their being a full internal user. The portal gives an outside party a window into the relevant part of the business's system, so they can see, and sometimes interact with, the things that genuinely concern them.
The customer portal and the vendor portal
The customer portal gives a customer controlled access to what concerns them as a customer: their orders, their invoices, the things relating to their dealings with the business. The vendor portal gives a vendor controlled access to what concerns them as a vendor. In both cases, the principle is the same: the outside party, customer or vendor, gets a controlled window into the part of the system relevant to their relationship with the business.
Why portals are valuable
Portals are valuable because they let a customer or vendor see what concerns them directly, in the system, rather than the business having to separately tell them. Without a portal, a customer wanting to know about their orders or invoices has to ask, and the business has to respond, a separate, manual effort, and the customer's information is only as current as the last response. With a portal, the customer can see, directly and currently, the things that concern them. This saves the business the separate effort of informing, and gives the customer or vendor genuine, current visibility. The portal turns keeping customers and vendors informed from a separate effort into a by-product of the connected system.
Controlled access is the key
The key quality of a portal is that the access is controlled. A customer or vendor is not a full internal user with broad access; the portal gives them limited, controlled access to specifically what concerns them, and only that. This controlled nature is what makes it sensible to give an outside party a window into the system: they see what concerns their relationship with the business, and nothing beyond it. The portal lets the business open a window to a customer or vendor without opening the system.
The portal keeps customers and vendors connected
The deeper value of the portal is that it extends the connected system to reach customers and vendors. The connected Odoo system holds the genuine, current picture of the business's dealings; the portal lets a customer or vendor see, in a controlled way, the part of that genuine, current picture that concerns them. So a customer or vendor is, through the portal, connected to the genuine state of their relationship with the business rather than being entirely outside it, dependent on separate communication. The portal is how the connected system genuinely reaches the customers and vendors at its edges.
The takeaway
The Odoo customer and vendor portal gives a customer or vendor controlled, limited access to see, and sometimes interact with, the part of the business's system that concerns them, their orders, their invoices, their dealings, without their being a full internal user. Portals are valuable because they let customers and vendors see what concerns them directly and currently, saving the business the separate effort of informing them. The access is controlled, which is the key, and the portal extends the connected system to reach customers and vendors. For how we approach Odoo, see our ERP practice.