Originally, Decisions was designed as a rule and workflow engine that could be embedded into other applications and solutions. As demand for the product grew, Decisions began selling directly to customers who wanted to manage their own business processes without code.

At the same time, resellers and other software providers began using the software in industry-specific situations. These businesses wanted to present their own branding and maintain a corporate image while leveraging Decisions’ solutions for their clients. In an effort to empower business users to own and maintain processes while still providing them the opportunity to brand their platform, Decisions now allows users to apply a skin to the Decisions portal.

In our recent webinar, “Branding the Portal,” we lay out the value of branding the Decisions portal and discuss the no-code functionality that makes this possible.

Why Brand Your Portal?

Before you brand your portal, it’s important to understand the business benefits of this process. In some cases, clients may opt to not brand the portal because the benefits of branding don’t apply to their intended use.

For example, if you plan on only using Decisions as a back-end machine, spending time to brand the portal for other customers might not make sense. Likewise, if you have no external or customer-facing processes, you probably won’t benefit from having your own branded portal. If you have your own customer-facing UI, you don’t need branding on the portal itself because your UI will overlay on the customers’ end.

For many businesses, though, branding offers clear benefits. It can reinforce a strong customer loyalty for businesses while supporting marketing and advertising efforts by keeping the brand top of mind.

Branding can also drive internal culture and give employees a common brand experience they can unite around. Whenever the portal is visible to customers or a large segment of your employees, branding can be valuable in supporting your company’s marketing mission.

How to Brand the Portal

The Decisions platform offers several different options to integrate branding into your portal interface. A built-in theme editor, for example, makes it easy to customize the icon, font, and other design elements. These elements are click-to-configure, saving you the hassle of needing to interact with CSS.

Meanwhile, easy-to-adjust studio/portal settings allow clients to change the tab name, favicons, and even the portal icon that displays on the user end. The login page can also be fully customized so that end users have the experience of logging into your brand’s owned platform, rather than a vendor solution.

Because the platform’s customization options include no-code functionality, it’s easy to use the theme editor and other tools to quickly make changes that don’t require any technical knowledge, while still offering sleek, professional branding for your portal. To learn more about the steps involved in branding your portal, watch our full webinar.

How to Brand Forms, Dashboards, and Emails

Users accessing your version of the Decisions platform will be constantly interacting with forms and dashboards, so it’s important to be able to brand these elements just as you would the login page or main portal interface.

The forms editor makes it easy to drag and drop features to include in any branded form, including buttons, drop-down lists, file upload fields, images, and other elements. For more complex form development, CSS can also be used. The process of creating branded dashboards is almost identical to the process of creating forms, offering a mix of drag-and-drop functionality to add branding elements and CSS for customers who prefer this approach.

Businesses can also upload email templates into the Decisions designer studio and easily use them to create and execute an email workflow.

Custom CSS is always an option to brand your Decisions platform portal, but the platform itself provides a wide range of no-code editing and branding tools to make professional portal branding accessible to anyone, even if you don’t have any technical training or a developer background. For tech-savvy users, fewer files can also be used to override default system styles.

Watch our webinar to learn more about where to access this functionality.

Your Business, Your Brand

When you’re providing applications and services to your customers, branding matters. Branding the Decisions platform helps your customers associate your company with the business automation solutions that achieve new efficiencies and work capabilities—and that helps your business build a better reputation among your customer base.