What are the BeLazy portals for?
BeLazy's Content and Project Hub is the front door for every localization request. It offers two methods to fetch projects: the built-in connectors, where BeLazy is actively querying the projects available, and the workspaces, which allow a flexible, API-based connection from a third-party system.
You are probably asking - why portals in plural? Every TMS and BMS have a single portal. They are part of the solution, and are hosted where the TMS/BMS is hosted, the same domain, slightly different URL. They conform with the look and feel of the TMS/BMS, and are generally limited in customizability.
BeLazy's portal approach is different: let a thousand portals do their magic and turn customers into loyal users. While BeLazy is the central hub for accepting and processing projects, projects can come from anywhere. Based on the Project Ingestion API and workspaces, we prepared a functional portal that BeLazy users can deploy both for themselves and for their customers.
Using the portal, anyone can place orders into BeLazy, from any URL. Therefore the portal can be owned and managed by the customer - internal or external -, or it can be managed on the customer's behalf.
We recommend setting up one portal for each and every larger customer, if possible, within the customer's firewall, on premise, using the customer's single sign-on solution.
How customizable are the BeLazy portals?
Customizability is the cornerstone of this solution. We have seen how other portals try to force customers to learn how their provider is working, by having to select for example from among their provider's workflow names. In the BeLazy portals there is nothing that relate to provider information, all the expressions, all the metadata, all the branding and even the capabilities may be customized to the customer's needs.
BeLazy offers four levels of customizability:
Level 1: Customer-specific metadata.
Use the portal to gather information that is specific to the customer. The portal directly reads the metadata configuration of the workspace you create and configure, therefore making the portal display only the metadata that the customer needs to enter and that you can base your workflows and mappings on is only a matter of configuration. No development needed.
Level 2: OpenID-based authentication.
The portal can be deployed on Windows and Linux, as a docker image, under a web server like nginx, Apache, Caddy or IIS, and it is fully compatible with OpenID. The documentation describes how to use the portal with Microsoft Entra and Google accounts, but if your customer uses OKTA, Ping or any other OpenID-based authentication service, the portal can be easily integrated with that. You can enable guest ordering - in that case, there will be interface for checking order status, and the form will include contact information - or enforce that only logged in users can order - and the contact information comes from the login.
Level 3: Config-based limited customization.
Change the logo, the brand color, the surfaces, the sign-in background, the font types, the order status names and the file-type badges directly from the configuration. You can enable people to start ordering after sign-in, or wait for a confirmation from the admin.
Level 4: Use vibe coding to extend, change or customize the system further.
The backend is written in ASP.NET Core 10, C# 13, OpenAPI, Serilog. The frontend is React 19, TypeScript 6, Vite 8, Tailwind CSS v4, shadcn/ui. The database is SQLite by default, but can easily be replaced with any other database of your choice. The entire solution was vibe coded by senior developers, and one of the principles in the system design and technology choice was that it should be possible to change this system easily, within a day.
What are the different user rights?
One portal is one organization, with different members in the organization with different rights. A user is everyone who has ever signed in. They appear after their first sign-in — you cannot invite someone in advance. The administration table shows who they are, which provider they used, their role, their rights, their status and their first and last sign-in.
Administrators have all rights. Members' rights can be enabled and disabled:
| Right | Meaning |
| Submit order | Can create orders |
| See other people's orders | Can see everyone's orders, not only their own — including orders submitted by guests |
| Download files | Can download deliverable files from the portal directly |
| Acknowledge order | Can confirm a delivery by hand after the automatic attempts have failed |
| Manage users | Can manage other users and the rights of each user |
How do I get the BeLazy portal?
BeLazy offers one standard portal for those who use BeLazy with the Google Sheet project management tool at no extra cost. This portal is offered via https://(yourorg).portal.belazy.cat.
You can host the portal, you can have your customer host the portal, or we can host the portal for you or for your customer. If you would like to try it, we can set up a trial portal for you in the portal.belazy.cat subdomain. Access to the source code is available as part of the advanced portal subscription - we need funds to keep improving the capabilities.
If you would like to try the portal, get in touch.
What's the goal of the BeLazy portals?
Good quality data is the core of good project management. The BeLazy portal enforces the right, customer-specific metadata, which is later used for reporting too.
In the short run, the BeLazy portal is "yet another" portal. However, this is going to turn into the corporate solution to resolve shadow localization. Our goal is to include all functionality that requesters on a customer's site generally require - no matter the technology stack you use. Offering AI translations only through the allowed channels via the portal improves AI governance, offering access to reporting, terminology management and other capabilities make customers want to use this portal rather than the email.
So what next?
We have prepared two articles for you:
- Portal setup and workspace customization describes how you can set up the portal to show only specific data for your customers.
- The portal walkthrough describes with screenshots what the otherwise pretty easy-to-use portal is capable of doing.