How do I set up Multiple Child Companies to have access to Viewpoint’s cloud, Without Sharing the same parent company email domain?

IMPORTANT

THE LIMITATIONS DESCRIBED IN THIS ARTICLE APPLY ONLY TO OUR LEGACY CLOUDWORKSPACE AUTHENTICATION, NOT TO TRIMBLE ID OR VIEWPOINT ID SSO

Author: Eric Vasbinder

Some construction companies are larger conglomerate-style entities with multiple child companies. In these cases, the parent company may like to establish a contract to host their Vista ERP in our Viewpoint cloud whilst enabling the ERP users at each child company to continue to access Vista. They desire the child company end users to only be able to access their company, and, ideally use their own child company email addresses as the login to the cloud. The parent company may not want to give every child company user who needs cloud access to Vista a parent company email address.

In the past, in NeverFail, customers in our cloud could have their login names be any one of a number of email addresses, containing any domain name as part of the login. This fit the aforesaid use case well. However, in our new Azure cloud, the middleware management solution that we use is not capable of setting up multiple login email domains. At first glance, this might seem to be a roadblock to adoption of the cloud by the types of larger conglomerate style companies mentioned above. However, that is actually not the case: our hosted RDP Cloud for Vista in Azure is more flexible than it seems at first glance.

Something that customers should know is that all end user login names in our cloud can either be in the standard format of “username@companyname.tld", OR they can be in the format of “VIEWPOINT\USERNAME.CODE”, where “CODE” is a 4-5 character, random alphanumeric code assigned to the overall parent customer account. This second option for a login name does NOT disclose to the end user who their parent company is, or even that they have a parent company, as the code is a random jumble. In fact, this username format is the one that we recommend.

For example, a large conglomerate parent company, “BIGConglomerate.com" (whose company code is “IUME”) would have a child company, “ElectricalSub.com" and another “PlumbingSub.com". In this situation, let’s pretend that user Tammy Tourmand exists at ElectricalSub, and user Gerald Marcus exists at PlumbingSub. Both users would log in to their parent company’s hosted ERP. Their username formats however, would not betray anything about the parent company, as the usernames would be in the format of “VIEWPOINT\ttourmand.IUME” and “VIEWPOINT\gmarcus.IUME”.

In addition, an email address should be added to each user’s profile in the online portal for Viewpoint’s cloud. This email address will allow each user to reset their own passwords, and receive notifications as necessary. The email address can be ANY email address that the administrator wishes to specify for each end user. This is very flexible, as the admin can specify that the email addresses for Tammy Tourmand and Gerald Marcus are ttourmand@electricalsub.com and gmarcus@plumbingsub.com respectively.

This is quite powerful: unlike other clouds, including our previous NeverFail cloud, an end user’s login name and their email address are disconnected. This allows for a much greater level of flexibility and provision for future expansion by our customers.