Portals
Portal anatomy
The structure of a portal: cover, sections, assets, and settings.
A portal is a curated, shareable view of your brand assets built for a specific audience. Rather than handing over a file dump or a generic shared drive, you give clients and partners a branded, navigable space that shows exactly what they need — nothing more.
Think of a portal as a microsite for your brand library. You control the cover, the structure, the visibility, and which team members can make edits. Your clients open a link and see a polished, on-brand experience.
The cover screen
Every portal opens on a cover screen. This is the first thing a client sees: your portal's cover image spanning the full width of the viewport, a logo in the upper left, the portal name, and an optional short description.
The cover screen is intentionally minimal. Its job is to orient the visitor — "this is the Meridian Coffee brand portal" — before they dive into the library. A well-chosen cover image (a product shot, a campaign still, a clean abstract texture) does a lot of work in establishing that this is a professional, curated resource and not a rushed file export.
From the cover screen, clients click Enter portal to reach the library. Editors and Owners see an additional Edit button in the top-right corner that opens the portal editor sidebar.
See Cover image and logo for sizing and format guidance.
The library
The library is the main body of the portal — the organized collection of assets the visitor can browse, preview, and download. It is structured in up to three levels:
- Sections — the top-level categories (e.g. Logos, Photography, Icons)
- Folders — named groups within a section (e.g. Photography → Campaign)
- Sub-folders — one additional level of nesting inside a folder (e.g. Photography → Campaign → Spring 2026)
Assets live inside folders or directly inside sections. Keeping assets inside folders rather than loose in sections helps the library stay scannable as it grows.
When you create a new portal, boveDAM pre-populates five default sections: Logos, Photography, Icons, Videos, and Documents. You can rename, reorder, hide, or delete any of these, and add your own custom sections to fit your workflow. See Default sections and Folders, sub-folders, and depth for more.
Brand modules
Brand modules are structured content blocks that appear alongside the asset library. They let you embed context that goes beyond a file — things like color palettes, typography specimens, usage guidelines, or a short brand narrative.
Modules appear in their own tab within the portal. A client switching from the library to the brand tab can read your color codes directly, copy a hex value, or review which typefaces are in use — without downloading a separate guidelines PDF.
Modules are optional. A simple portal for a single campaign shoot might contain only a Photography section with no modules at all. A full brand portal for a packaging client — for example, a portal named "Brand Kit Q3 2026" for a CPG studio — might include a complete color system, primary and secondary typefaces, and a dos-and-don'ts usage grid.
Portal settings
Every portal has a settings panel accessible to Owners and Editors. Settings control:
- Portal name and description — what clients read on the cover screen
- Visibility — Private (login required), Password-gated, or Public; see Visibility settings
- Default locale — the language shown to visitors who have no browser preference set (en-US or es-MX); see Default locale
- Custom slug — the URL path clients use to reach the portal at app.bovedam.com
- Member access — who holds Owner, Editor, or Viewer access on this specific portal
Changes to settings take effect immediately for published portals. Draft portals can be edited freely without affecting any live client-facing URL. See Publishing and unpublishing for how to move a portal from draft to live.
The editor view vs the client view
The experience of a portal differs depending on your role.
As an Editor or Owner, you see the portal exactly as a client would, but with a persistent editing toolbar overlaid at the top of the screen. The toolbar surfaces quick actions: add assets, rearrange sections, change the cover, jump to settings. A status badge indicates whether the portal is in Draft or Published state, so you always know whether what you are looking at is live.
A realistic editor flow: you receive a new batch of product photography from the studio. You open the portal named "Brand Kit Q3 2026" for a packaging client, drag the new files into Photography → Product, rearrange the section order so Photography comes before Documents, then click Publish. The client's URL never changes — they simply see the updated library the next time they visit.
As a Viewer or guest client, you see the portal with no editing controls. The cover screen, the library, and the brand modules are all present, but nothing is clickable for editing. Viewers can browse, preview assets in a lightbox, and download files. They cannot see hidden sections or any settings panel.
Password-gated and Public portals are accessible without a boveDAM account. Private portals require the visitor to sign in with an account that holds Viewer access or higher for that portal.