Knowledge Base

Project Clients

Clients are individuals or organizations for whom projects are executed. Associating clients with projects helps in filtering, reporting, charting, and in many other areas.

In addition, you can give your clients access so that they can login to view reports shared with them, engage in online discussions, share files and even participate in business workflows (e.g. bugs, change requests and approvals).

Client access is free.

Client Login

Virtual clients are clients that do not have a username and password. They cannot log in to Celoxis. When you create a client, you can optionally assign it a username and a password. You can also set their login credentials from the edit client screen.

If, at a later time, you wish to withdraw login access, simply blank out the username and password for that client.

To prevent any accidents, clients are not notified about their usernames and passwords. It is up to you to communicate their credentials to them.

Client privileges

Every client account can be configured to have the following privileges:

Allow client to view task information, excluding financial information.: This determines whether clients can view task details. Financial fields (including custom fields) are never shown to the clients.

Allow client to view details of progress update on tasks.: This determines whether clients can view updates and comments on the task.

Allow client to do progress update on tasks.: This determines whether clients can add comments on a task.

If you share reports with your client, then the above privileges override the data shared in reports. For example, if you share a task list report to a client that does not have the Allow client to view task information, excluding financial information. privilege, then that client will see an empty report.

Client Hierarchy

Consider the following scenarios:

• More than one person from a client organization wants to collaborate on a project.
• Your company does projects for different departments (or branches) of a client, but executives want consolidated reporting. For example, your company may do projects for IBM India and IBM France and your CXOs may want a consolidated report for IBM. Also, you don’t want people from IBM India to access IBM France’s projects and vice-versa.
• You want to prevent accidental access of one client to another’s project. For example, you do not want to give CBM access to IBM’s projects because of a typo.

That’s where the concept of Client Hierarchy comes in. Celoxis allows you to create client hierarchies for better reporting, collaboration and access control.

Example

Consider the following clients:

 1    Peter Parker

 2    IBM
 3    ├── John
 4    └── Alisha

 5    Acme
 6    ├── Acme (France)
 7    │   ├── Pierre
 8    │   └── Chloe
      │
 9    └── Acme (India)
10        ├── Ravi
11        └── Suresh

There are a total of 11 clients.

Peter Parker is an individual client. There is no hierarchy.

IBM has two child clients - John and Alisha.

Acme has two child clients - Acme (France) & Acme (India), each having two child clients - Pierre and Chloe for the former and Ravi and Suresh for the latter.

To create this parent-child relationship, use the “Parent” field from the add/edit client screen.

Project Visibility

When you assign a project to a client, it is visible to that client and all its descendants. Continuing with the above example:

Setting project clients

You can set a project's clients from the project's add/edit screen or from project bulk actions. The first client becomes the project's primary client

Clients Reports and Dashboards

You can share reports and dashboards with clients. You can share tabular, pie charts, bar charts and many other views of reports. For more information, read the chapter on dashboards

To share it with a client, select the client in the Visible to Clients field in the add/edit report form. If you pick the All option, the report will be shared with all clients.

You can also control which project tabs are visible to clients in a similar way. Navigate to Top Menu ▸ ▸ Admin ▸ Project Management ▸ Project Views, edit the view and select the clients as described above.

For more information on report and dashboard sharing, read the chapter on report sharing.

Note that clients can modify filters that are marked as promptable in the report's filter tab.

Financial data is never displayed to clients even if those columns are accidentally selected.

Client Actions

Clients can actively collaborate through the system increasing transparency and reducing duplicate work. It also helps maintain an audit trail and ensures things don't fall through the cracks.

Viewing clients

Clients can be viewed by admins and those users having the View Client privilege.

To see the client list, from the LHS menu click on More ▸ Clients

Creating clients

Clients can be added by admins and those users having the Add Client privilege.

To add a client"

1. Click on Top Menu ▸ ▸ Client
2. In the Basic tab:
   1. Fill in Name, Email, and Phone number.
   2. If the client account is part of a hierarchy, enter the parent.
   3. If you do not wish the client to have a login, enter login and password, click on the virtual checkbox.
   4. Assign appropriate privileges.
3. In the Custom Fields tab, fill in the appropriate custom fields.
4. In the Preferences tab, select the appropriate locale, date formats and dashboards.
5. Check the Add another check box if you wish to add more clients.
6. Submit

Importing Clients from CSV

Celoxis provides you with the ability to import clients from CSV. If you have a Microsoft Excel file, then you can export it in CSV (comma separated values) format and then import it in Celoxis.

To import clients, go to the clients page – Main Menu ▸ More ▸ Clients and then click on the Import button. Upload the client in the format described below.

Fields supported:

• Name - mandatory
• Email
• Phone
• Username - the login name.
• Password - the plain text password.
• Virtual - false or true to indicate whether the client can login or not respectively.
• Custom Fields - you will have to create the fields in Celoxis first

Deleting Clients

To delete a client, click on that client and from the actions choose Delete.

When a client is deleted, all its sub-clients are deleted as well. Data like projects, tasks, issues, files etc. is not deleted.

If you accidentally delete a client, you can go to Top Menu ▸ ▸ Admin ▸ People Recycle Bin and restore that client.