For a long time, logistics has been much more than simply moving goods from A to B or storing goods high and dry. More and more often, customers want to be involved in your logistic process. They want to gain insights into their goods, the executed activities, and SLA results. Insights you can only provide with the right tool: a web portal. To help you meet these increasing demands, a new web portal is on its way. Thanks to the improved technology, you can soon provide your customers with data faster, safer, and more appealing. In this blog, we share four improvements in the new web portal to support your customers’ wishes even better.

Higher performance

One of the most important requirements of a web portal is speed. The new portal uses the latest API technologies to gather data much quicker. Instead of loading all data at once, the data is now retrieved from 3PL Dynamics right before it is shown to the user. Especially in overviews that contain a lot of data, this makes a huge difference in user experience.

In the background, the portal uses OData APIs with pagination. This is the new standard for requesting data from Business Central. This standard way of working is not only faster but is also more flexible than the way the current web portal gathers data.

Offer more insights

When you click on a line in the web portal, you are redirected to a new pop-up: a so-called card (for example an article card). On these cards, you can show detailed information, add downloads, or continue to overviews of related records. In that way, you give your customer more information in a natural flow.

Furthermore, the new web portal has the possibility to show visual overviews. This is done with visual dashboards on the dashboard view. These dashboards contain graphs based on the information you provide your customer with on the different list pages. Via these graphs, the user can immediately click through to relevant information too.

Configure without programming.

When configuring the web portal, it is you who determines what fields and graphs you want to show, where you want to show them, and in what way you want to visualize them. Matching the philosophy of 3PL Dynamics, you can configure a lot without even one new line of code needed.

In the web portal, the following functions can be configured at least:

1. The table fields that are shown on the list or card views (all fields with the supported data type of the OData API are available);
2. All descriptions of views, fields, and graphs in multiple languages;
3. Fixed filters on the views (for example, Document type = Receipt)
4. Dynamic filters that can be used to hide certain information (for example, Order customer no. = Customer no. of the user)
5. Sub views that must be accessible via the card views, including additional filters
6. Files that can be downloaded
7. Graphs that are shown
8. Data sets based on which graphs are created
9. The arrangement of views in the menu

With everything that is freely configurable, the possibilities are endless. Therefore, the web portal comes with a powerful set of templates in 3PL Dynamics to create these complex configurations with the push of a button. Configurations you can afterwards adjust to your own specific whishes of course!

Next level security

A system that is developed without special attention to cyber security is vulnerable to data breaches and security issues. Therefore, from the beginning, the new web portal is developed with special care for security. The full workflow, from registration to your Business Central environment to registering your customer, is fully secured according to the latest standards.

In practice, the end user will log in to the web portal using his username and password. To this procedure, authentication via an app is added. That means that even if the username or password is compromised, the intruder still has no access to your data.

Furthermore, the connection between the web portal and your 3PL Dynamics environment is secured with OAuth2. The most important benefit is that no passwords or usernames must be stored in the web portal to gain access to your Business Central. It is enough to authorize the web portal in your Business Central environment.

Start using the new web portal

The new portal is in the last phase of development. As we speak, a number of customers are testing the functionalities in the portal to find possible minor errors or missing functionalities. After that, you can start using the new web portal too. Soon we will share the scheduled rollout of the new web portal to all customers. So stay tuned! If you have any other questions, please email info@elevate-it.be