Landing page => Self-Service

[tjedelhauser]

Hi Ed,

first of all, great project, really impressive work!

I noticed that when the site is first opened, it automatically redirects to the admin login. Would it make more sense to route this to the self-service portal instead? That portal already includes a direct login link for analysts, so nothing would be lost for them.

For regular users, the self-service portal should really be the first point of contact and it's the interface they'll actually be using day to day, and landing on an admin login screen isn't very intuitive or welcoming for them.

Thanks again for the great work on this project!

Regards
Thomas from Germany ;-)

[edmozley]

Hi Thomas @tjedelhauser, thanks for this, and for the kind words about the project.

You were right about the behaviour and right about why it matters. Opening FreeITSM always went to the analyst login, which is an odd front door on an installation where most people are end users, and as you say the portal already links back to the analyst login so nothing is lost by going the other way.

This is now built and on main, with one addition. Rather than swapping one hard-coded default for another, it is a setting: System > Branding > Landing page chooses between the analyst login and the self-service portal. The default is unchanged for existing installations, so nobody gets a surprise on upgrade.

The addition is a per-analyst override under Preferences > Start page. The thinking was that pointing everyone at the portal is right for your 190 end users but costs your 6 analysts a click every single day, and that trade should not be forced. Analysts can opt back to the analyst login for themselves without changing what anyone else sees.

That override turned out to be the interesting part technically. The decision happens before anyone has logged in, so the usual per-user preference storage cannot reach it, and browser local storage is invisible to PHP. It ends up as a cookie that caches the preference, with the account copy re-applied every time you sign in, so your choice follows you to a new computer rather than being stuck in one browser.

One deliberate limitation worth stating: the portal has no preferences area (only analysts can set their preferences via the account menu at the top right), so end users get whatever the administrator chose and cannot override it. That felt like the right direction, since the setting exists to point end users at the portal in the first place, but say if you think otherwise.

Documentation:

Landing page
Landing page, developer guide