Plexara
What you will take away from this lesson
Suppliers send price sheets, clients send monthly extracts, partners send reconciliations. When those arrive by email they sit in one person’s inbox, and the next step is somebody copying a spreadsheet into a shared drive.
An external persona can let its people upload straight into the portal. The file lands in a folder of their own that your staff can open, and from there it is registered as a table the way the 500 series registers any spreadsheet.
Learning Objectives
- 01Let an external persona upload, and say where each upload lands.
- 02Give staff the External files level that lets them open those folders, or manage them.
- 03Register a client’s file as a table and join it to the warehouse.
- 04Keep the table current when the next month’s file arrives.
Where this lesson sits
Lesson 805 set up the supplier’s persona. This lesson lets the supplier send files, and connects them to the registered tables of the 500 series.
800 Series: Working with People Outside the Company
- 801Who can open whatThe Share dialog by access: people and their roles, personas as groups whose membership is read when the item is opened, guests, and the one general link an item has.
- 802Requests for accessWhat a person without access sees, how the owner approves as viewer or editor or declines from the email, the Inbox or the dialog, and the limits and expiry an administrator sets.
- 803Posting to a channelPosting an item to a Slack, Mattermost or email channel as a link share of its own, what the channel sees, who the link opens for, and removing it.
- 804Portal permissionsThe persona editor by surface, one access level per portal area, the sharing permission, the access summary, and what deleting a persona checks first.
- 805Your clients as external peopleAn external persona per client organization, accounts that live in your identity provider, and the fixed limits: only what is shared, only shared threads, no sharing, no agent.
- 806Files from outsideUploads into an external person’s own folder, the External files folder staff open, and registering a client’s monthly file as a table beside the warehouse.
- 807Capstone: a supplier’s collection, thread and monthly fileAn ACME supplier collection shared with the supplier’s persona, a shared thread beside an internal one, and the supplier’s next price sheet registered and joined into the review.
The 800 series builds on sharing within the team from lesson 303 and registers a client’s file the way the 500 series does. Every example is on the ACME demo tenant, with a fictional supplier, Blue Harbor Wholesale.
Uploads into their own folder
Four rules decide where an outside upload goes and who sees it.
Uploads by external people
- 01
Uploads is a switch on the external persona
A new external persona starts with it cleared. Ticked, the persona’s people may upload. It cannot be set on an internal persona.
- 02
Each upload lands in the uploader’s own folder
An upload to any other folder is refused. The uploader sees their own folder and the files shared with them, nothing else.
- 03
Nobody is shared the file on arrival
The upload is not shared with anyone. The people who see it are those whose persona opens External files, and administrators.
- 04
The deployment’s upload limits apply
The same size limit and file-type detection as every other upload.
The Blue Harbor Wholesale persona on the demo tenant has uploads on, so a person at the supplier who signs in sees an Upload action in their own folder and nowhere else.
A supplier upload on the demo tenant
Dana Okafor holds the Blue Harbor Wholesale persona on the demo tenant. The supplier’s January sheet went in through the portal, not by email.
A supplier upload on the demo tenant
What was uploaded
price-sheets/blue-harbor-price-sheet-2026-01.csv
- Blue Harbor Wholesale’s January 2026 price sheet: 400 rows with the same seven columns as the November sheet, uploaded by Dana Okafor from Resources into a price-sheets folder inside Dana’s own folder.
What the supplier sees
My Resources, Shared with me
- Dana’s own folder and the files ACME has shared. No ACME folder appears.
What ACME staff see
External files > Dana Okafor (Blue Harbor Wholesale)
- The same file in a folder named for Dana and the supplier, shared with nobody, ready to register beside the November sheet.
The External files folder
Staff reach outside uploads through one persona level, so who picks up client files is decided per persona rather than per file.
External files, a persona level
| Level | What it allows | Typically for |
|---|---|---|
| None | No External files folder | Every external persona, and any internal persona not given more |
| View | Lists every external person’s folder and opens the files | Staff who pick up what clients send |
| Manage | Also renames, adds versions, moves, deletes, shares and uploads into those folders | The people who own the client relationship; administrators always have it |
External files appears as a folder on the Resources page, with one folder per external person named for them and their persona. It is set in the persona editor under Portal access.
From a file to a table
A price sheet is only useful joined to the products it prices. Registering it puts it beside the warehouse without copying it.
The supplier’s sheet, found by search, with its table
What the agent calls. This is the exchange the agent has with Plexara on your behalf, shown for the technical reader. You ask in plain language; you never type any of it.
search "supplier price sheet" sources: resources
Blue Harbor Wholesale price sheet (November 2025)
mcp:resource:71131796... text/csv
table
connection scratch
query_table scratch.uploads.admin_supplier_price_sheet
follow true
format csv
sample_sql SELECT * FROM scratch.uploads.admin_supplier_price_sheet
-- every column is VARCHAR, so a join to a
-- typed column castsThe table on the demo tenant was registered over the supplier’s November sheet in the 500 series and follows each new revision of the file. Its catalog entry says what every column means and that sku joins to the product table, so any agent that searches for supplier costs finds it.
The next file
A supplier sends a new sheet every month, and the table should move with it.
When next month’s file arrives
Replace the file’s content
Table follows the file
- Someone with Manage on External files adds the new sheet as a new version of the same file. A table registered to follow the file returns the new rows on the next query, with nothing to re-register.
A new upload each month
Register again
- When the supplier uploads a new file instead, registering it under the same table name on the same connection moves the table to the new file and leaves earlier files in place.
Lesson 505 covers keeping a registered table current in detail.
Files from outside, end to end
The supplier uploads into their own folder, staff with External files open it, and a registered table makes the sheet joinable to the warehouse until the next one replaces it.
Key terms
Three terms cover files from outside.
Key Terms
- Own folder
- The folder an external person uploads to and the only folder they see, apart from files shared with them.
- External files
- The Resources folder that holds every external person’s own folder, opened by personas set to View or Manage.
- Registered table
- A table over a file, queried and joined like any warehouse table, as in the 500 series.