Setting Up Your Organization in Portal

Overview#

Timebase Portal is where your Timebase installation becomes yours. You create an organization, invite the people who work with you, and link the installation you run on your own hardware, which licenses it.

This article is for the person setting the organization up. Creating an organization makes you its Admin, and everything below assumes that role. If somebody invited you into an organization they already run, read Working in a Timebase Organization instead.

Portal is the one part of Timebase that we host. You do not install it, and nothing in your plant needs to reach it directly:

Only Pulse talks to Portal. Your Pulse holds a single outbound connection to portal.timebase.com on port 443, and every other component in your installation gets its licence from Pulse rather than from the internet. There is nothing to configure on the Pulse side.

That also means Pulse keeps working when Portal cannot be reached. It caches everything it has been told, so an outage at our end, or a site that is offline for a week, changes nothing about whether your components run.

What you will need: an email address you can receive mail at, and a Timebase installation with Pulse running. Portal needs a screen at least 768 pixels wide; on a phone it asks for a larger screen.

Sign in and verify your email#

Open Portal and sign in. Signing in for the first time creates your account, so there is no separate registration form.

Then check your inbox. Until you click the link in the verification email, Portal shows one page headed Verify your email and nothing else. Once you have clicked the link, select I've verified my email on that page: Portal checks again and lets you in.

The four setup steps#

After sign-in, Home shows four steps and works through them with you. Each one ticks off as you finish it, and the next one opens.

Step 1: Tell us about yourself#

Select Complete your profile and fill in your first name, company, persona, industry and region. Your last name is optional. It takes a minute, and Organizations stays out of the sidebar until it is done.

Step 2: Create your organization#

Select Create organization. The New organization drawer asks for one thing: the organization's Name, between 2 and 100 characters. Its Type is set to End user for you. Select Create.

Creating an organization makes you its Admin. There is no approval step on our side.

If somebody has already invited you into an organization, this step reads Accept invitation instead. Accepting makes you a member of theirs, and the rest of this article is written for whoever administers it.

Step 3: Invite colleagues#

Select Invite colleagues, or Skip for now, link Pulse to come back to it later. An invitation carries an email address and a role:

Invite a second Admin early, so the organization never depends on one person. Your colleagues see the invitation under Pending invites at the bottom of their Home page, with Accept and Decline.

Step 4: Link Timebase Pulse#

This is the step that licenses your installation.

1. In Pulse, open Instance Info and copy the Instance ID. It starts PULSE-.
2. Paste it into the box on Home and select Link Pulse.

Your installation, and every component behind that Pulse, joins your organization with a Free licence, issued the moment it links. There is no card to enter and nothing to restart. Licensing Your Timebase Installation covers checking that it arrived, an installation that cannot reach Portal (My Pulse can't reach Portal), and what to do when Portal does not find the ID.

Until you link it, your installation is not idle. An unlicensed Timebase runs on a default tier with fourteen days of grace from installation. See Licensing and Entitlements.

When all four steps are done, Home becomes a short welcome page: your organizations, the knowledge base, and a link to support.

Your organization's page#

Open it from Organizations in the sidebar. At the top, the organization's type and status and how many members, instances and licences it has. Then three buttons:

Below that, four sections:

Select an instance to open its own page: its details, its fields and notes, its Licenses (with Download .license, New License, and Renew on each licence), and Metrics, which shows "Nothing reported" unless the installation sends usage telemetry.

Managing members#

Inviting. Invite member on the Members section, with an email address and a role.

Changing a role or removing someone. Select the pencil on their row. The Edit member drawer changes their role between Member and Admin, and Remove takes them out of the organization after a confirmation. Two things are refused, so the organization is never left without an administrator: you cannot remove yourself, and you cannot remove or demote the last Admin. A removed member can be invited again, and the Members filter's Any status shows removed rows.

People who have not signed in yet appear in Members as Not signed in yet.

Notes and fields have a visibility level#

Both carry a level, and it decides who can see them:

You can write at your own level or below, and edit an item only if its level is at or below yours. So an Admin-level note is invisible to your Members, with nothing on screen to tell them it exists. That suits a commercial note nobody else needs, and is a trap for something people are waiting on. Default to Member level unless you have a reason.

Licences#

Linking a Pulse issues its Free licence for you. Beyond that:

For anything in the right-hand column, raise a support ticket and name your organization.

Your profile#

Open View profile from your name at the bottom of the sidebar. It shows your email, name, access, company, persona, industry and region, and your Memberships: each organization with your role and status in it. The email is fixed, as it is the identity you signed in with. Edit changes the rest, and is also where you can close your account. Security has Reset password, and the same menu under your name has Change password.

Troubleshooting#

Related articles#

• Licensing Your Timebase Installation - linking a Pulse in detail, including air-gapped sites
• Working in a Timebase Organization - what the people you invite will see
• Licensing and Entitlements - what a licence grants, and what an unlicensed install can do
• Setting up Timebase Pulse - the component that holds the connection to Portal