What's a portal and customer numbers

[SpeedBullet]

Hi what exactly does a portal do? Can you describe a workflow how to use it? I imagine it's something like this:

Customer (contact/account?) goes to espocrm, logs in (?correct), and can open cases and see progress on those cases and can read knowledge base articles? Anything I've missed?

Also, is it possible to have auto increment customer numbers (account entity)? Our company requires the use of customer numbers (numeric). Is it possible to rearrange the primary ID to be a customer number (now it's alphanumeric)? Or do I have to add a custom field? How to make it auto increment upon creation of a new record? Thanks in advance.

[yuri]

http://www.espocrm.com/features/workflows/

https://github.com/espocrm/documentation/blob/master/docs/administration/portal.md

I'd recommend to add custom auto increment field.

[SpeedBullet]

http://www.espocrm.com/features/workflows/

https://github.com/espocrm/documentation/blob/master/docs/administration/portal.md

I'd recommend to add custom auto increment field.

Thanks, that's perfect. I'll try to add the auto increment custom field.

[SpeedBullet]

I created the auto increment custom field. How do I choose the first value? I'd like to start at something else than one. Do I have to change this in the database?

[yuri]

It's related to mysql: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...specific-point

[SpeedBullet]

It's related to mysql: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...specific-point

I thought it would be something like that. Is it possible to use this number in the espocrm search field?

[yuri]

Not sure what you mean. You can use autoincrement fields in search.