Introduction

For several enterprises, the services offered are destined not only for internal employees, but for external resources as well. Sometimes, a service desk will need to provide support to users from multiple enterprises or sites without any connections from one environment to the other for requests or equipment.  This is what we call external support.

Octopus allows you to manage this type of approach towards your customer base, not only for their requests and equipment, but also for their service and lease contracts.  Data isolation is applied, therefore limiting users to only see data owned by their site or enterprise.

Modifications Applied 

With the external support mode, the following modifications are applied to the default behaviour of Octopus. These modifications have been separated in two parts:

Modifications to the application and modifications to the Web Portal.

Application

• Access to the Incident/SR type is restricted (empty) if the user (or request)  is not associated to a site.
• The association between a user and a CI depends on the site. Each user and each CI must have a site in order to be related. Without this information, a user or CI is "without site" and can only be used with other "without site" data. 
• Service and lease contracts are categorized as:
  • Sold
  • Purchased
• Reports - Support contracts are considered "Sold" rather than purchased and assigned to the site rather than the supplier. 
• When printing the CI form, it is indicated if it is a sold or purchased contract.
•  ATTENTION, when adding an activity and sending it by email, if you use the option "Send a single email to all users", the addresses of all recipients will be visible to ALL!

Web Portal

• The Web Portal does not allow the selection of a user by the requester.
• The Web Portal does not allow the selection of a CI other than the ones from the user's site. 
  • An additional option allows to filter the available CIs on the Web Portal in relation to the user's department and only show him CIs from his department. 
• The CI search is based on the site. No results will be found if a site was not added to the requester's file. 
• The site is automatically the one of the requester. 
• There is no possible selection of a site by the requester. 
• My profile section.
  • No possible modifications by the requester to the site in his file.
  • No possible approval delegation.

Register to this Service

Normally if a user uses the registration service on the Portal in external support mode, he cannot complete a request as he is not associated with any site. There is an option for the external support mode in Octopus that allows a user to register and add his Client Number that matches the abbreviation to his site.

With this option in place, the new person can register to the service, gain access to the requests available for his site and create his user file in just one step.

For more information, or to enable this register option with your external mode, contact the Service Desk.

Other features

The standard behaviour applies to the rest of the application and the Web Portal.

If you wish to activate the external support mode (ExternalSupportMode.Enabled) in your environment, please contact our Service Desk.