Prevent Edits to the Profile in a Submission Portal

This article is considered appropriate for administrators or workspace users with an advanced level of knowledge about submission portals. If you are a beginner or intermediate user, we recommend to read the following articles first:

• Submission Portal Key Concepts: Beginner
• Submission Portal Key Concepts: Intermediate

For more information about suggested learning paths, see Introduction to Submission Portals: START HERE.

Contents

• Overview
• The Purpose of Preventing Edits to the Profile in a Submission Portal
• Where to Find the Profile Settings
• Changing the Profile Edit Permissions

Overview

Administrators of a Zengine program can configure a submission portal’s Profile to be View-Only, preventing portal users from entering their information in a portal, or editing it once complete. This article will walk through that process.

The Purpose of Preventing Edits to the Profile in a Submission Portal

The Profile form is designed to collect basic information about a portal user or applicant in a submission portal. This serves as a main identifier of the portal user’s submissions: a Profile is required before a new applicant or portal user can begin creating an application package. 

Typically, the Profile can be edited after being completed the first time.  For example, to allow a portal user to update contact information, or perhaps the person in charge of a program has changed, and the new primary contact would like to update the Profile with their information. This is how most programs typically operate.

However, in some circumstances, a program may have the need to prevent edits to a Profile once it is in place. This is most likely in a scenario where program staff is inviting applicants to apply to a program and would like to prevent other, non-invited applicants from creating an application package. In these instances, administrators create Profile records in the workspace on behalf of the invited applicants before inviting those applicants to access the submission portal.

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A Profile must be completed before a portal user can advance to the first stage of their submission package. If this is not done by the user, or if workspace administrators do not create one for a portal user in the administrative portal, then the portal user will receive an error message upon trying to access the Profile step, and will be unable to advance.

Where to Find the Profile Settings

In the Submission Portal Settings, the option to change the Profile permissions can be found on the General Settings tab of the Profile page. 

To find the setting to prevent portal users from editing the Profile:

1. Logged into a program as an administrator, navigate to the Settings & Tools section by selecting the cog wheel icon in the top navigation bar.
2. Select the Submission Portal tile from the Plugin Settings section.
3. Select the Edit button to the appropriate submission portal.

4. Select the link for Profile in the Portal Sections pane on the left side of the screen. 

5.  Select the General Settings tab.

Changing the Profile Edit Permissions

To prevent changes to the Profile:

1. Select the radio button next to View ONLY.

2. To save the changes made on this screen, select the blue Save all settings button in the lower right corner of the screen.