How To Setup a Client Extranet with Onehub

Almost every company has a website. Spending time and money to build your brand online is a no-brainer for any marketing professional. Corporate websites are a great way to communicate your message to an audience, generate leads, and educate customers about your products and services.

However, few companies have the expertise required to build a secure website to share files and information on a one-to-one basis with clients. Instead, we rely on email attachments, burning DVDs or managing ftp servers to send files.

Onehub makes secure websites fast and easy.

How it works

Onehub is an extranet collaboration service that enables you to create a secure extension to your existing web site in a matter of minutes. With Onehub, you can setup secure workspaces, called Hubs, with easy-to-use customization tools and drag-and-drop widgets. You can easily control user permissions by inviting users via their email address and assigning the users a role. We have also made it easy to upload and download files and folders (including their contents) from your computer or corporate network.

Setting up your extranet

The first step is to create a Onehub account so you can create multiple hubs and setup a customized login screen. You can create your first hub for free so play around with the service first to make sure it meets your needs. For a client extranet, we will create one hub for each client we want to share files with and setup a branded login screen that we will link to from our existing website.

Customizing your login screen

Each account has a unique URL in the form of yourcompany.onehub.com. You can change your url by clicking on Account > Account Profile. In the account section you can also change your default account theme and account logo to customize the look of your login screen.

NOTE: If you are on the free version, you url is hubs.onehub.com/username.

Creating a Hub

To create a hub, click the Create a New Hub button on the user home page. If you are already in a hub, you can return to the user home page with the My Home button in the top right of the page. The new Hub wizard will ask you for a hub name and hub description. You can change the template to determine what widgets are in the hub by default and you can always add or remove pages and widgets after you create the hub. The second step enables you to change the theme of the hub.

Inviting your clients

Sharing and user permissions for each hub are accessed through the Share button in the top left of the page. Only Administrators and Authors will see the option to share a hub. To share, simply enter the name and email of each person and select a role. The default role is contributor and allows users to upload and download files, modify tasks and calenders.

What your clients see

Your clients receive an email from Onehub with a link to your login screen. When a client clicks the link, they are asked to setup a password and then taken directly into the hub you invited them to.

Integrating with your existing site

It is important to make it easy for your clients to find your secure extranet now that you have created one. One easy way to do this, is to create a Client Login button that links to your account url. When a client logs in, we check to see if they have access to any hubs that are part of your account. If they do, we take them directly to that hub.

You can learn more about how to use Onehub in the Onehub support area.