Creating simple workspaces - ‘Single Project Redirect’ explained

In this blog post I’m going to discuss a feature of project-extranet called Single Project Redirect. I’ll explain how it works and how you can use it to make accessing your extranet easier.

This article assumes you have already setup your own extranet, so if you haven’t done so, get yourself over to www.project-extranet.com/try and sign up for a free extranet demo account.

Why and how
As someone who has the need for an extranet facility - a project manager, business owner or administrator - you are probably responsible for more than one project. So when you access your extranet you will see, by default, the main summary home page. This contains an aggregated view of your system: all your project calendars combined into one; your top contacts; recently viewed and updated projects list. This will allow you to quickly access the information you need.

As a person responsible for a range of tasks, you should find this aggregated launch portal very useful. But for users who are only a member of one project within your extranet, the home page summary view is potentially confusing; all they really need to be able to do is to get to their single project.

This is where the Single Project Redirect switch comes in. If enabled, which in project-extranet it is by default, then users who have just the one project assigned to them get taken straight to that project, by-passing the home page summary and saving the user a click.

So, Single Project Redirect makes the interaction for users who only have one project much easier - especially when combined with the default starting app feature that allows you to set the default starting page users see when accessing a project.

For example, if you are setting up a file sharing project, by setting the default project app to ‘documents’ and ensuring Single Project Redirect is switched on, a user logging in to your extranet can be taken straight to the documents file structure.

You can use these two features together to create a range of project spaces for your customers depending on their individual needs.

So just to recap, the features for Single Project Redirect are:

• Single Project Redirect can be enabled/disabled via the ‘Extranet Settings > System Settings’ option.
• Single Project Redirect only applies to standard user accounts, not system administrators.
• If a user has access to only one project, they get taken straight to that project upon login.
• The Home, Projects and Contacts buttons are hidden when the redirect is enabled, the rationale being that there is no point giving users access to the projects list when they only have access to one project. The home button will take them back to their project and the contacts are all available via the projects contacts app, if you have chosen to use it.
• As soon as a user is given permission to view a second project upon logging in they view the standard home summary page and the Home, Projects and Contacts main options reappear.

I hope that explains this feature and demonstrates some of the powerful ways you can use project-extranet to achieve your perfect extranet solution. As always though, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch using the details on our contact pages.

And don’t forget to keep up-to-date with extranet news, hints and tips, details of updates, and also find us on twitter for the very latest from the world of online collaboration.

Gerry