What Zoho Creator's new portals changed about the way we work

This is a guest post by Emuobosa Onerhime, Customer Success Manager, Web Work Tools.

At Web Work Tools, we build business solutions on Zoho Creator. Over the years, we've delivered solutions for many clients—clients who increasingly need enterprise-grade software.

The feature I didn't see coming

A few days ago I was setting up a customer portal for one of our apps, a supply chain solution we’d built for a client. When I went to add the portal, there was a new option: Choose a Template. 

I picked one, and within minutes the portal wasn’t just a login screen anymore. It had a proper front page, designed, with the app sitting behind it. The portal had quietly turned into something closer to a website.

Portals are no longer just access points

For us, portals had always been access points and nothing more. The design options were limited enough that we never sold web work at all; we sold applications, full stop. If a client wanted a web presence, that meant a separate project, a separate tool, a separate bill.

The new portal page builder closes that gap. The solution we build and the face it shows the world are now the same thing, on the client's own domain, behind their own login. For anyone building on Creator, that makes the work more presentable and easier to sell.

What happened with our first client

We'd built a supply chain solution for a catering company managing stock across a dozen locations. When the new designs landed, we built them a landing page for it.

It changed the conversation. The solution had been an internal tool for staff; the landing page let them show it to associates and partners. New relationships came out of that, and the client started thinking past internal use entirely. Impressed by what we'd delivered on Zoho Creator, they came back wanting to do more with Zoho across their business.

How one app became three

That catering project has since grown into something bigger. What started as one app is now three:

• Supply Captain for food items

• Supply Platform for industrial items

• Supply Nexus for a mix of both

They came to us for Supply Captain, but once it was live we saw demand for industrial and blended use cases, so we built the other two on the same foundation. They loved the result. We're now licensing Supply Nexus to them through the Developer Zone, and they're rolling it out across their branches in the coming months.

Two builds, now one

Serving a client used to mean two separate builds: a business website and a Zoho Creator solution behind it. The new portal designs fold those into one. One landing page per solution, on a custom domain, with login-protected access, built where the app already lives.

We're focused on fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) businesses right now, since those need continual optimization, but the shift applies far more widely.

What's next for Web Work Tools

Our next stop is product managers building MVPs. Between the portal designs, direct coding integrations, Zoho Flow and RPA for automation, Analytics for cross-platform data, and QEngine for testing, Creator now covers the full path from idea to working product. The question has flipped: It's no longer whether we can build something on Zoho Creator. The question now is "why wouldn't we?"

Zoho Creator is ready for enterprise.