So what are the best ways to share your Podio data with outside people?

Transcript

Narrator 0:01
You’re watching another supercharged masterclass with Jordan Samuel Fleming your opportunity to learn the ins and outs of Podio design and development from one of the top Podio partners in the world.

Jordan Fleming 0:14
Hey, it’s Jordan Fleming here with another supercharged masterclass. Now, today I’m gonna go and bit of a longer video cuz I’m going to dive into the different ways you can share Podio and the things you do in Podio, with people outside of Podio. Now, there are a number of different ways of doing this. In fact, I have a podcast about this is well as we speak right now is just about to launch.

And it’s one of those areas that you need to think very carefully about because there are pros and cons of each way of doing it. And I try in this video to dive into the main ways of doing it, to show you how it looks. And to give you those pros and cons. It’s really important because if you do it right, it means you can bring people into your Podio continue using Podio to be awesome for all the work inside of your business, and share it properly. If you do it wrong, you can end up with a lot of hassle, a lot of people not knowing what’s going on, and quite honestly a big fucking mess. So let’s dive into Podio.

Okay, so here we are in Podio. Now, there are a couple different methods that you can use to share data with people who are external to Podio. Now, the first one we’re going to talk about, actually are kind of involving bringing them into Podio itself. And that is two ways. One, you share an item and two, you add them to a workspace. So in this case, if I wanted to share this specific item, I could share this and I could pick my person, and I can write a personal message. And I have the choice to do read only or not this case, I won’t bother and click Share.

Now over here on I’m logged in to this person’s profile, you’ll see of course, something popped up. And if this person that you’re sharing it with is not actually in Podio, they’re gonna get an email. And if they know nothing about Podio, I’m gonna tell you right now, this is gonna be confusing to them, they’re gonna come in, and they’re really not gonna know where the hell to go. So you got to bear that in mind, when you’re bringing external people into Podio, whether it’s sharing item sharing workspace, you got to bring in, kind of keep in mind that they’re not going to know anything about Podio. So you know, you’ve got to kind of factor that into the way in which you make your decisions. Once I’ve shared an item, and they, they would then have to go through the point of creating a Podio user, they will then see a an area here in the organisation with which is called shared with you.

Now, when you share an item, it goes into this shared with you, I personally hate this, I very rarely do it. And the reason being is that there is no way of filtering or organising, was shared with me. So if you’re using the shared item a lot, you’re gonna find out that people aren’t having to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, it’s, it’s it becomes a bit of a mess. So I would personally say this is the least effective way of doing it.

Now, of course, the other way is I can just add someone into a workspace. So this, here’s my workspace, and I’ve added a user into it. Now the good news about that is of course, they can then interact with you very much like anybody else, you can comment you can indirect message, but you can comment, you can, you know, tag them on things, you can assign them and things inside of something. And so the power of Podio exists in this.

But of course, I’m going to caveat that because, like I said before, if you bring people into Podio, who are not used to Podio or ….

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….the danger zone is that you’re then going to become a bit of a Podio support. Because as you probably know, as you get into using Podio it really is a there’s a couple month learning curve before you become really really efficient with it. So I always say to people, look, you know, there’s nothing wrong with bringing people into Podio. There’s nothing wrong with all of that. But you got to know that that can also open up problems as well.

Now another way that you can kind of do a half the halfway house with this is you can use, say you’re just wanting to gather some information from people. So not really share information but gathered, you could use a prefilled web form. And I’ll do a masterclass about that. That is an easy way of sending some information to someone and getting them maybe to update their contact details without bringing them into Podio. But let’s move on to really kind of sharing information.

And the next step up for me is around External links and portals. Now, an external link, as I think I’ve showed you, in other videos, External Link gives people a link to click, and it takes them to a web page on which you can embed a tonne of Podio information, including links to go to other places, or links to, you know, go to a webform, etc. The problem with that, and the potential problem with the other solution here, which is the mini mini app, which is a functionality of a plugin called procfu.

See, these are really great for externalising information. And this is actually the miniapp, which as you can see, we can be branded, how I want it, I can include fields, I can make them read only fields so that they can’t touch them, I can just you know, I can display fields, as read only only, I can embed, you know, I can actually embed different things here different links here. So I, you know, it’s not just one page I’m seeing, I can show them a whole lot of information. This is a really great solution.

For instance, for a customer portal, like this is to show them, hey, here’s everything we did for you, you know, or here’s what you purchased. Here’s the history, here’s your current balance, the Mini Apps, and the External links can work really well for that I prefer the miniapp, such as this, because it can be branded really well. You can have these dynamic kind of feels to them. And you can adjust how, with the mini app, you can adjust how people log into it. So you can actually get them to log into a portal via a simple password via Podio. If they’re in Podio, although that will probably not. You can do it by an email and password, right.

So an email and password a user based one like I just so that means this user can only see the things that I’ve assigned to that user to be able to see versus just a generic password to get into the portal, which means anybody with that password can see everything in there. Right? The Mini Apps is a really nice step up, it can allow you to give people a tonne of information, navigate around smoothly branded decently, not perfectly, but breathe decently. And the relative cost of doing it is pretty, pretty low compared to the final stage, which is where you sort of build your own web application.

And this is one where this is one that we did years ago. And every single bit of information in this web application from, you know, members to properties to vendors, they’re my profiles to everything synced from Podio. And any changes they make here sinks down. That’s kind of the gold standard. And if you’re looking to provide a really, really, you know, in kind of inclusive way of sharing Podio data, this is definitely the kind of gold standard, because you can of course, use your own domain, you can, you can, you know, make it a subdomain of the domain for that customer for yourself. And it can feel like they’re just logging in to your website. And yet all the information is fully synced from Podio.

So those are the kind of the two tiers of sharing Podio information one kind of uses Podio and brings people in and the other externalises data and shows people that data. Those are the options that are the best way of doing it. Now, what do I think? How am I going to sum this up? What do I think are the best practices? I’ll tell you. All right, well, there you have it. I hope that gave you a good dive into how you can, of course use Podio to do all the amazing things in your business, but then externalise it and bring other people into that day to get them the ability to use Podio data.

As I said, you know, if you’re going to have people in Podio a tonne, bringing them into Podio is okay if they’re gonna be using it every day. If not, really you have to look at the best ways of externalising Podio to them, we via either a procfu miniapp, which I will dive into and show you how to build some of those or via your own custom portal. Like I said, you know, one is quicker, cheaper, and not quite as controllable. And the full fledged portal is a bit is amazing and will give an amazing experience and give you an opportunity to build essentially a web app for your Podio data so someone can really You have a great experience. But it of course takes longer and costs more money.

But the key thing is this, don’t bring people into Podio unless they’re going to be using it all the time. Because all that’s going to happen is you will become a Podio support vehicle, they will be going every month, they’ll log in and be like, What the fuck? Where is this, I don’t know what’s going on. So it is far better to give the data they need outside of Podio and those are two best ways of doing it.

Hope that helped. As always, please hop over to YouTube and give it a subscribe on the channel. So you don’t miss any of these awesome videos. Please do check out the supercharged podcast give it a like give a real give it a rating. It really does help to spread the gospel of Podio and of course you know if you’ve got anything disagree, want to see me cover something have any questions, pop over the website or YouTube and do it in the comments, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for watching.

Narrator 11:02
Thanks for watching this Supercharged masterclass with Jordan Samuel Fleming CEO of smartphone don’t forget to hit the subscribe button on our YouTube channel to be notified of new podcast episodes Podio masterclasses and in depth Podio extension reviews