Portal accounts and logins for external users?

Question

Hi I'm evaluating Appian and have been going through the courses. 
 I'm particularly interested in the Portal feature and have a few questions regarding the same: 1) All the resources I've come across on your website talk about how portals can be used to engage users without a login or account. But what if I want my customers to perform some actions without a login but also create an account and then get access to more actions through that account? 
 2) How can external users like customers be authenticated? How do I use portals to do this? 
 3) Let's say I have a quote request form on my portal which can be filled by anonymous users without a login. Now how will these people view the quotes I am creating for them without an account? Let's say I am creating 3 quotes to satisfy the requirement filled in by the anonymous user. Now I want to give them an account where they can view all their requests and view the status of their request, approve or reject quote etc... how can this be achieved with Portal? 
 
 Would be great to get answers to these questions. Looking forward to hearing from you. 
 
 Regards, 
 Kritish PR

Stefan Helzle · Answer

After creating the accounts, your users would switch over to the Appian main application and not use the portal anymore.

Soma · Answer

There are two ways to achieve this 
 1. Once the external user has requested a quote >> Write it to record >> Display the unique identifier of the record to user as a reference id. Give the user a page in portal where they can enter the reference id and view or act on the record. 
 2. Ask for details like name, email etc., from the user while requesting a quote. With those details create user inside appian using createUser smart service and add them to required groups. Once done an email will be sent to user with Appian login credentials. With the login details, the user will be able to login to Appian site and look for the details regarding the quote.

Soma · Answer

Yeah, just have an interface with some text fields to collect email id and name and other stuffs. Have a button called Register, upon clicking which you have to call a process using a!startProcess() that have create user and adding to group logics. Once done, the user will get the login credentials in email.

Portal accounts and logins for external users?

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