This is not your contract with us
Read this first, because it decides how much of the rest matters.
The work we do for you is governed by the terms of business attached to your own proposal — the wording you were sent, and accepted, when the project was agreed. That version was fixed at the moment the proposal was issued and does not change afterwards. It is the contract.
This page is not that. It is a standing notice about using the client portal: who gets an account, how to look after it, and what we expect while you are logged in. Nobody signs it and we can change it without re-issuing anything. You may be reading it on our website rather than in the portal — we publish it in one place and farsidestudio.com republishes the current wording — but either way it is the portal it is talking about, and it is not about the website.
Where the two touch the same subject, your terms of business win. If anything here appears to contradict them, treat it as a mistake in this page and tell us, and rely on your proposal.
Who can have an account
Accounts are by invitation. You cannot sign yourself up: the sign-in form will not create an account for an address we have not already set up, and asking for a link for an unknown address does nothing.
We create accounts for people we are working with — clients and the people at their organisation who need access to a project, contractors engaged on our work, and studio staff. We decide who that is, and we can change it.
You need to be old enough to enter a contract in your country to hold an account here. This is a tool for people doing work, not a consumer service.
Looking after your account
Your account is yours alone. Do not share your password, and do not pass on a sign-in link that was emailed to you — anyone holding it can become you.
Do not let someone else use your login, including a colleague who is “only having a quick look”. If a colleague needs access, ask us and we will set them up. Actions taken through your account are recorded as yours, which is exactly why a shared login is a problem: it makes the record wrong.
Tell us straight away if you think someone else has got into your account, or if a device with an open session has been lost. Also tell us when somebody leaves your organisation so we can close their access. We will not know otherwise.
Proposal and agreement links are different, and worth being careful with. The links we send for signing work without an account: holding the link is the whole permission. Forward one and you have handed over the ability to read that document, and to sign it. Send them on to colleagues only if you would have been happy for us to send it to them directly.
Using it properly
Some things are obviously not on. To be explicit, do not:
- try to reach data belonging to another client, project or person, or probe the app to see whether you can;
- attempt to break, overload or work around the security of the portal, or automate access to it at a scale it was not built for;
- upload malware, or anything unlawful, or material you do not have the right to share with us;
- copy material out of the portal for a purpose your terms of business do not allow;
- use it to harass anyone, or store personal data about other people here that you have no proper reason to be sharing with us.
If you notice something you should not be able to see, please tell us rather than exploring it. That is a genuine favour and we will treat it as one.
Content in the portal
Uploading something here does not change who owns it. Files, notes, project material and finished work belong to whoever your terms of business say they belong to, and this page does not decide that question or move the line — go to your proposal for the answer.
What we need in order to run the service is narrow and practical: when you put something in the portal, you are letting us store it, back it up, show it to the people with access to that project, and hand it back to you. That is all it is for.
The portal software itself — the application, its design and its code — is ours, and stays ours.
Keep your own copies of anything that matters to you. Please do not treat this as your only archive.
We can withdraw access
We can suspend or close an account, or remove access to a project. In the ordinary case that is simply because an engagement has ended or someone has changed role, and we will say so.
We may also do it without warning if an account is being misused, if we think it has been compromised, or if leaving it open puts someone else’s data at risk. Acting quickly is the point in those cases.
Losing portal access does not end our contract with you and does not affect anything already agreed or owed. What happens to the work, and to your material, on the other side of that is a question for your terms of business. If you need copies of your files, ask and we will sort it out.
Availability
We will do our best to keep the portal up, but we do not promise any particular level of uptime. There is no service level agreement here and none is implied.
It will be down sometimes — for deployments, for maintenance, or because something we depend on has failed. The database, the file storage and the hosting are run by other companies, listed on the sub-processors page, and an outage at one of them is an outage here.
Features change without notice. We build this for the studio and adjust it as we go, so screens move and things get added and removed.
If the portal being unavailable would genuinely hold up your project, email us — a person can send you what you need. Nothing about the work itself depends on this software being up.
Privacy
What we collect and why is set out in the privacy notice, and the companies involved are named on the sub-processors page. Both are public and neither is repeated here.
Changes to this page
We will update this page when the way the portal works changes. Your terms of business are not affected by anything we do here — those only change by agreement, in the way they say. Last updated: [[Date these terms were approved]].
Law and jurisdiction that apply to this page: [[Governing law and courts, which should match the terms of business rather than be decided here]].
Getting in touch
Email [[Contact email address for portal support]], or reply to whichever of us you have been dealing with — that is usually faster.
This portal is run by Farside Studio, a design studio in the United Kingdom, at farsidestudio.com. Registered name and address: [[Legal entity name and registered address]]. Company registration number: [[Company number]].
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Draft, not legal advice. These terms were written by reading the application’s source code and describe the system as built. They have not been reviewed by a solicitor, and every bracketed item above still needs an answer. They should be checked professionally before they are relied on — and checked against the terms of business, so the two do not disagree.