In our general guide for platforms, we describe the benefits of integrating PeerBoard as a part of your platform offering for education, alumni, association, membership, CMS and other platform types. In this guide, we give a detailed overview of technical steps you need to go through to enable such integration.
Quick summary:
- Partner token
- Create test boards
- Board integration
- Client self-serve
- White-label and customization
- Data sync via our APIs
- Announce to your customers
1. Partner token
First of all, make sure to talk to us, discuss the integration and receive your partner token. This token will allow you to create new boards programmatically for your clients and for us to attribute these clients to your integration with PeerBoard.
If you haven't yet, please send us an email to platforms@peerboard.com with a quick overview of what you do and how do you see us working together.
2. Create test boards
Now using our partner platform API for board creation and your partner token, you can start creating new boards for testing and production. We recommend you do that from the beginning using either curl or some other tool to call our APIs to start getting familiar with the process.
3. Board integration
Having at least one instance of PeerBoard you created, you can do a test integration for one of your test organizations. This process is similar to how any of our non-platform partners would integrate their board and is described in our general integration guide. This is the hardest part and may take you a day or two to implement.
4. Client self-serve
This is a very important part. Make sure your customers can discover the integration and easily activate it for their spaces. Here's the flow we recommend:
- In your partner portal or dashboard, next to all the different options available to the admins of the space, create a new Community button.
- On pressing this button before activation, show the activation page with the contents described below.
- After the board is activated, simply show the same button to everyone and open the board on pressing.
Activation page content we recommend using (feel free to improve/modify):
Welcome to <Your Brand> + PeerBoard integration
This partnership allows you to enable a community space for your organization in just one click. This discussion space is a private area within the organization for your clients to share knowledge and help each other. Note that they will see each other posts, comments and profiles. The benefit of this space is to provide them peer support, facilitate knowledge sharing, exchange problems and insights. Here's an example of how this space looks: [ideally here put a link to your community on PeerBoard, or use our public community url at community.peerboard.com]
For pricing, please check [PeerBoard pricing page](https://peerboard.com/#Pricing). PeerBoard provides a one-month free trial! [See below on our billing models, you may want to bill directly which we support].
For any related product questions, please share in [PeerBoard support community](https://community.peerboard.com/)]
Then add a large Activate button followed ideally by a screenshot with a preview.
And on hitting Activate, call our provisioning API you used before in Create test boards section.
5. White-label and customization
You can fully customize the look of your embedded boards:
- Using board creation API - you can pass theme information as a set of optional parameters
- Using our customization API - this may be handy if you are changing your branding and would like to update it for all your partner boards.
If you find yourself in a need of some extra functionality, just let us know and we'll be happy to add.
6. Data sync via our APIs
See Best Practices section in our API overview that apply to both our individual partners and platform partners. There're really just a few, but strongly recommended items: register users in PeerBoard, deactivate in PeerBoard, and update user information (name, avatar) when any of those events happen on your end.
7. Announce to your customers!
We recommend following these steps:
- Create your own community and set it up as a publicly accessible board to showcase the integration. This may be a great place for product updates, related discussions, AMAs with your team and more!
- Write both a community post and a blog post explaining how to activate this integration for your customers using self-serve mechanisms from the above.