Best practice for providing portal support for every staff member of a Customer?

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Hi folks.
Posting here rather than putting in a ticket in case it helps someone else in the future.
There are Customers, and Customers have Contacts.
I’m not even sure the use case I have is meant to be addressed by Contacts so please help me with my assumptions.

The Syncro documentation doesn’t make reference to a use case where every staff member of a Customer is a Contact and has access to the support portal, the Customers documentation, as well as tickets submitted by the Contact (tickets are owned by the Customer, not the Contact).

My expected use case is where all staff (Contacts?) of our contracted support Customers can submit email (or tray icon Agent Contact Forms) and we can provide links to the specific documentation URL for that solution or escalate as required and deal with that user and their tickets individually.

One of the next threads I was going to start was about how Agent Contact Forms go to the Customer email rather than the computer users email and the solution here was "You need to assign them to the asset for it to automatically assign them to the ticket submitted via the form. "

So users can be assigned to assets? Are those users Contacts or am I missing something here.

HALP! :smiley:

Thanks! Gareth

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Hi Gareth, I think the system would be more straightforward if the company was just the company, and contacts were just contacts, and you could mark one contact as the main. This is how a lot of MSPs do it, so I think that is familiar.

In Syncro, the company page and the main contact page are one in the same. The contacts should be the employees at that company. You can also create one for the main contact here instead of using the company page- because it only allows you to assign actual contacts listed on the contact tab to an asset. If you try to assign the company it won’t be listed in the dropdown.

When you assign a contact to an asset, any tickets from that asset submitted through the tray icon (agent contact form) will be automatically linked with that contact. (Ex, you’re signifying Kim works at ABC Company, this is Kim’s computer, any ticket from this computer’s agent is Kim.) That doesn’t work out if multiple people share logins though. Then you might want to have the contact unassigned and rely on those employees entering their email manually in the contact form.

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Hi Alexandra, thanks for your response.
We support many businesses with >50 employees as well as ones with >100+. They all have domain controllers and in instances where they don’t (we support many more smaller business with fewer than 10 users/computers) we could disable the tray icon Form policy for any shared assets.

What is the recommendation with regard to adding those (in our case) 1000’s of users and enabling portal access so that they can manage their individual tickets and see appropriate support documentation? Is this commonly how folks are doing it?

I’m concerned about identity and access management to Syncro on top of our DC management for their user accounts. Hopefully there’s a common workflow for how onboarding and management of large orgs works in Syncro based only on their email? I’m thinking specifically of managing Contacts as well as what assets are assigned to them.

The current documentation only seems to address a few Contacts for a Customer rather than all employees.

Thank you for your time in answering these questions.
Gareth

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So there will be some options and some limitations in this case.

Adding Contacts
Your best choice will be a contact import so you can add them in bulk, from the Contacts tab you’ll see an import button. Download the template from the template link.

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The template will include the correct customer_id but if you do a customer export, you can get all your IDs at once. The contact import will send them to multiple customers at once if you add the right IDs.

Portal Users
You’ll need to decide how you want to handle portal users, and there are two ways. One is where you do not use any portal users. The company will get a link to their customer portal which uses a generated key for them to access sent to their email. It is a bit less secure, as anyone with access to their email can use that code.

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They will then use the “Non-Portal User Group” permission set and you can set what they have access to. This will apply to every contact without a portal user- and if you add even one portal user to that company, then everyone needs to have one as it changes how they all log in. All companies will share this permission set.

Something to note, if you ever want to give them end user access to Splashtop, it will require them to have a portal user.

If you’d like to give them a portal user of their own, to bulk assign portal users, head to the Customers tab and select multiple customers with the checkbox icon. Then click Bulk Actions > Manage Portal users. Here you can enable portal users for customers, contacts, or the customer+contacts.

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One caveat here is that you cannot select all checkboxes on all pages, just the current page. So if you have a lot of companies to add at once, there may be some manual work. But it will invite all contacts at once. They will then get an email invite to create their username and password.

Assigning Contacts to Assets
This is only manual at this time I am afraid, it would be great if you could set this on a contact import somehow (as well as a portal user invite.) You’ll have to select the contact from the asset detail page. It’s not required to assign a contact, but you do need it if you want to link tickets from the agent contact form to a contact, or if you want a Splashtop end user to access only their own PCs.

There have been some feature requests for company employees to be able to sign up as a contact and a portal user on their own- it’s not something we have the capability of doing right now but we do want to support larger and larger databases so it’s something we’ll have to keep in mind regarding how we want to do that in the future.

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