The delivery portal (what partners see)

When you invite a delivery partner or a tender bidder, they land in the portal — a separate, isolated sign-in from the main app. This page describes what they see, so you know what you’re offering and can answer their questions. It doubles as help you can point partners at.

Signing in and the engagement list

The partner claims their invite link, signs in, and sees their engagements — every space they hold with you, across projects, as a list. Each row shows who it’s with and what stage it’s at; with many engagements, a search box filters by title or client, and stage chips narrow the list. This is the portal’s home; the person’s name and email sit top-right, and nothing about your projects leaks beyond the spaces you granted.

Two conveniences worth knowing:

Invitations can be accepted in-app. If someone signs in and has a pending invitation on their email address, the portal home lists it with an Accept invitation button — no need to dig the emailed link back out.
One email can wear both hats. The same address can be a workspace member on one project and a delivery partner on another; sign-in routes to the right surface either way.

What each person can do inside a space depends on their member role — viewer, uploader or editor; see People at the partner.

Inside an engagement

Choosing an engagement opens it with a left sidebar, mirroring the main app: pick a context, get its sections. An engagement switcher at the top jumps between spaces without going back to the list.

The sections depend on what kind of engagement it is:

A file exchange (a standing delivery partner):

Brief — what the engagement is, when you’ve written one.
Files — the same file browser you use, over their granted folders (see What partners get in Files). They upload here and download what you’ve issued.
Transmittals — the numbered issues you’ve sent them, each with its documents and an Acknowledge receipt button; and, for an editor, the transmittals they have issued to you.
Company details — their legal name, registered address and key contacts.

A tender bid (a supplier bidding for work):

Documents — the checklist of what you asked for, each row with the reference file to download and a slot to upload their response. A sticky Submit bar tracks how many required items are staged; nothing reaches your team until they press Submit.
Questions — a clarification Q&A. Bidders never see each other or each other’s questions.
Company details — as above.

What a partner can and can’t see

Reassurances worth giving partners, all enforced by the platform:

They see only the folders you granted — the rest of your tree doesn’t exist for them. The one exception is names on the way down: the parent folders above a granted one show as greyed, context-only waypoints (no files, no uploads), so a partner working in several packages can tell same-named folders apart.
Their uploads stay private to them (WIP) until they choose to issue them to you.
On a tender, bidders are invisible to one another — no bidder list, no shared questions, no hint of who else was invited.
Everything is branded as your client, not ddx (unless you turned that off for the engagement).

What partners get in Files

The portal’s Files page is the same components as your own, gated by the partner’s role rather than reimplemented — so the two stay in step. That means a partner gets:

The folder tree with carets, resizable and scrolling independently of the file list, and Back/Forward through the folders they’ve visited.
Click a file for the details drawer, plus right-click / ⋮ menus on documents and folders.
Preview in place, the “3 versions” chip, and the full version history — open, download, restore, and reorder revisions — with the version switcher for comparing one revision against the last. See Versions and revisions.
Upload confirmations naming what landed, the same as on your side.

What their role gates (viewer, uploader or editor):

Create subfolders — uploader and editor, right-click a folder or the empty space inside one, and only inside folders you have shared with them.
Delete — an editor may delete its own un-issued files, from the drawer. Once a file has been issued or shared it is part of the project record and delete is refused. Their deletes are soft: the file goes to your pending-deletions queue, never straight to erasure, so you can put it back.

Uploading, from their side

A partner uploads by dropping files (or a whole folder — its contents upload into the open folder, flattened, with a notice) or using the upload button in a folder. A file whose name follows the project convention becomes a controlled document; anything else becomes a descriptive draft. Big files stream in chunks with a progress bar, exactly as on your side. When they’re ready to hand a controlled document over, they issue it — and that’s the moment it appears on your Files page, badged from partner.

If they hand over the wrong thing, an editor can de-issue their own document from the drawer — back to WIP, with a mandatory reason that reaches whoever was told it arrived. The same rules apply as on your side: once the file has been shared onward or pinned to a transmittal, de-issue is refused, and the hand-over stays on the audit trail either way. See Taking something back off issue. They can only ever de-issue their own uploads — never anything of yours.

Transmitting back to you

ISO 19650 expects formal issue in both directions: you transmit to the appointed party, and the appointed party transmits its deliverables into the CDE. An editor on a delivery space can pick their own issued documents, add a subject and an acknowledge by date, and issue a numbered transmittal to the project team.

It uses the same TX numbering, the same register and the same void rules as yours. On your side it lands in the Inbox on the Transmittals page — see transmittals from partners.

Deliberately narrow: a partner can only transmit documents it owns, and only to the project team. There is no recipient picker and no partner-to-partner exchange, so nothing about your other partners is exposed.