Partner Links: Give Clients a Live Status Page Without Giving Them Access to Your Board

The Problem: "Any News on My Requests?"

If you work with clients or external partners, you know the email. It arrives every week or two: "Hi! Quick question - any news on the bugs we reported last month?" And every time, someone on your team stops what they're doing, opens the board, filters by the client's items, and writes a status summary by hand.

The obvious fix - inviting the client into your project management tool - creates new problems. They see your internal discussions, your priorities, your other clients' work. They need an account and a seat. And most clients don't want to learn your tool; they want an answer.

Partner Links solve this with a middle path: a private, read-only status page, scoped to exactly one partner's items, that stays up to date on its own.

What a Partner Link Is

A partner link is a unique URL you generate from your workspace settings and send to one partner. Opening it shows a clean page with your logo and product name, a "Prepared for ..." greeting, and every feature request and bug you track for them - grouped into four plain-language statuses:

• Received - in the queue, not started yet
• In progress - actively being worked on (this includes review and rework, so your partner sees progress, not process)
• Ready to ship - finished, waiting for the next release
• Shipped - live, with the release version and date it went out

No login. No account. No seat. Your partner bookmarks one URL and checks it whenever they want - the page always reflects the current state of your board.

Tags Are the Scope

Partner links are built on tags. You pick one or more tags when creating the link, and the page shows every task and bug carrying at least one of them. That's the entire access model - nothing else in your workspace is ever exposed.

In practice, most teams create one tag per partner (the client's name works well) and apply it the moment a request comes in. New items with the tag appear on the partner's page automatically - there is nothing to sync or re-share.

Selecting multiple tags is useful when a partner's work spans several areas: a link scoped to Acme and Acme-Mobile shows the union of both.

Setting It Up

1. Go to Settings → Integrations → Partner Links
2. Enter the partner's name - it appears on their page as "Prepared for ..."
3. Select the tag or tags that scope their view
4. Click Create partner link and copy the URL - for security, it is shown only once
5. Send it to your partner

That's the whole setup. From then on, keeping the page accurate is just keeping your board accurate - which you were doing anyway.

Built for Sharing Safely

Because the page is meant for someone outside your team, it is deliberately conservative about what it exposes:

• Unguessable, revocable URLs: each link contains a cryptographically random token. Revoke it in settings and it stops working immediately.
• Read-only, always: there is nothing to click, edit, or break.
• Scoped fields only: titles, descriptions, statuses, dates, and release versions - no assignees, no internal comments, no priorities.
• Public overrides: if an internal title is too raw for a client, set a Public Title or Public Description on the task and the partner page uses that instead.
• No search engines: partner pages are excluded from indexing.

One habit worth keeping: descriptions written for your team sometimes contain internal links or references to other customers. Skim a partner page once after creating it, and use public descriptions where needed.

Closing the Loop with Public Submissions

Partner links pair naturally with FlowBoard's public submission form. Together they close the full request loop without a single account:

1. Your partner reports a bug or requests a feature through your public submission form
2. Your team triages it and applies the partner's tag
3. The item appears on their partner page, and they follow it from "Received" to "Shipped"

The status email nobody enjoyed writing simply stops existing. When the work ships, the partner page says so - with the release version attached.

Partner Links vs. Public Roadmap

FlowBoard also offers a public roadmap, and the two serve different audiences. The public roadmap is one page for everyone - it shows the tasks you explicitly mark public, on a capacity-based timeline. A partner link is one page per partner - it shows everything carrying their tags, in status groups, behind a private URL.

• Public roadmap: marketing your direction to all users
• Partner link: reporting status to one specific client or partner

Many teams use both: the roadmap for the world, partner links for the handful of relationships that deserve their own view.

Get Started

Partner Links are available in every FlowBoard workspace under Settings → Integrations → Partner Links. If you're managing client work in FlowBoard already, tagging a client's items and creating their link takes about a minute - and replaces every status email after that.

For more on working with clients in FlowBoard, see client communication that doesn't drown your team and managing client projects in agencies.