Manage multiple accounts

A common practice for some organizations is to use a single Service Desk account to manage service delivery. Some organizations benefit from using more than one account.

For example:

1. Some organizations use a separate account as a test account. There you can test new functionality and/or different settings before enabling them in your production environment.

2. Some organizations choose to maintain complete separation between different departments, so they create multiple accounts. This approach is usually used to keep HR, IT, and Finance as unique entities for security or confidentiality purposes. This can be particularly helpful when your organization uses the service desk platform to deliver services to both internal (employees) and external (customers) service desk audiences.

3. Some organizations allow individuals to access their Service Desk account when they are already defined in the service desk account of a different organization. This often occurs with people who are external to your organization, such as contractors.

Factors to consider

Do you want to employ multiple Service Desk accounts within your organization?

A single organization can utilize multiple accounts, as long as each user login (email address) is defined in only one of the accounts. See Initial Setup for instructions.

If a user (identified via their email address) is used in more than one account, consider the following:

• Email addresses are used by Service Desk as unique identifiers. When the same email address is associated with more than one account, there must be a way for the application to identify which account you would like to access.

• While the same email address (user login) can be used in multiple accounts, passwords are unique to each account.

If you determine that your organization requires multiple accounts, for example, one for HR, one for IT, and one for Finance, note the following guidelines for successful log in into the service desk application:

• Login via a browser: Use your account login URL: https://<account domain name>.samange.com

  This URL uniquely identifies the account you wish to log into and therefore helps Service Desk check your password in relation to the correct account.
  

• Login via the mobile app: Based on the user ID (email) and password you can log in directly into a single account. After you provide your credentials and select Log In, if your email is linked to more than one account an additional screen displays where you are prompted to enter the name of the account you would like to access. To find your account name:

  1. Log in via a web browser.

  2. Click your avatar in the upper right corner and then select Profile from the dropdown list.

  3. Locate the account name directly under the Account Name heading. You need this information to continue a login using the mobile app.

• Login via API: Use a token for authentication. Tokens are unique in the system therefore, you do not need to provide any additional information to identify the account you want to access. Please click here for more information on tokens for API access.

For security reasons, Service Desk will never display the list of accounts your email is associated with.

When attempting to access Service Desk with an email address that is linked to more than one account, you may see one or both of these error messages:

• When logging in from a non-unique domain such as ‘app.samanage.com’, the error message below can display:
  
  This URL uniquely identifies the account you wish to log into and therefore helps Service Desk check your password in relation to the correct account.  
  
  Incorrect email or password. Please try again.
  
  
• If API access is attempted without a token, API authentication will fail. Basic/HTTP Digest authentication will not work for multi-account users. This following error message will display:
  HTTP 401 (Unauthorized)
  
  

Multi-account users and single sign-on

When using SSO and a single domain name with multiple accounts, you might need to define several applications on the Identity as a Service (IDaaS) side and connect each of the applications to the respective Service Desk account. This is similar to working with a different application from an IDaaS solution perspective.

End-user authentication

When the end user clicks Login, a pop-up window opens. There the user can choose from any of the different authentication methods provided by Service Desk. Users whose accounts are defined in multiple Service Desk accounts must identify the relevant account (the account name is case sensitive).

Administrators need to provide users who have multiple accounts with the different account names. To locate an account name, navigate to Setup > Account > Account summary.

Related topics