Creating a School Portal Solution within SchoolsBuddy

Using SchoolsBuddy to create a School Portal solution has never been easier!

Our August 2021 release (Release 37) sees some exciting new features designed to transform your SchoolsBuddy dashboard into an information portal with the ability to add links, pages and extra information to be accessed by staff or parents with a single click.

Even more exciting is this amazing new functionality is completely free and will come as standard to all SchoolsBuddy customers. Of course you don’t have to use the new feature but we highly recommend that you do!

So what can you do?

The idea is that you can now add a series of documents, links and information to your dashboard for quick and easy reference. Documents and links can duplicate content from other sources or be unique. The links can be to a page on your main (or any other) website, an uploaded document/PDF, or content created within your SchoolsBuddy platform for a particular purpose.

What is it for?

• Quick links for policy documents such as uniform, absence or health and safety
• Documents such as your extra-curricular programme or lunch menu
• To access other systems used by the school
• Quick reference for newsletters or event information
• Any other items you would like to display to staff and/or parents

What’s clever about it?

• You can choose who the links are visible to based on their user-type eg. parents, students, staff, admins or external providers.
• You can select featured links to show on the dashboard while other links will be shown in the link library (a button will show on the dashboard to see ‘all links’)
• Content can be created directly within SchoolsBuddy using a familiar editor, including image uploads for embedding
• Featured links will also show on the Portal Links tab of the new mobile apps
• Links can be created with any external website, which will open in a new window so their SchoolsBuddy dashboard remains open

TWITTER – We now also offer the option to show your school’s Twitter feed on the SchoolsBuddy dashboard for instant updates.

The sky is the limit of this new feature, schools can really tailor this school portal solution to provide a real-time information source for parents making life easier all round. And we won’t stop there! We will be making future additions and improvements to the portal links feature in our next releases… watch this space!

Customers can view a support article for this new feature here