Manage multiple accounts

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Introduction

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

For example:

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.
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.
Some organizations allow individuals to access their SWSD 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 SWSD 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 his/her email address) is used in more than one account, consider the following:

Email addresses are used by SWSD 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 SWSD check your password in relation to the correct account.
Login via the mobile app: Based on the user ID (email) and password you can login directly into a single account. Once you provide your credentials and select Log In, if your email is linked to more than one account:

An additional screen appears where you are prompted to enter the name of the account you would like to access. To find your account name, log in via a browser and go to the My Account page.
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, SWSD will never display the list of accounts your email is associated with.

When attempting to access SWSD 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 appear:
This URL uniquely identifies the account you wish to log into and therefore helps SWSD 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 appear:

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 SWSD 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 SWSD. Users whose accounts are defined in multiple SWSD 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.