Hot on the Plate - II
So here is the Main Course for SupportCenter Plus 7012. There were lot of queries from our customers on one particular integration. Yes, finally SupportCenter Plus will have Active Directory Integration from 7012.
Active Directory Integration:
Active Directiory Integration is important for a Customer Support Rep because it will allow him to log on through his Active Directory authentication and is also more secured than the usual login procedure. SupportCenter Plus will support the following features regarding AD Authentication,
1. Importing Active Directory Contact Details to SupportCenter Plus.
2. Automatic Synchronization with Active Directory in order to track changes.
3. Enabling and disabling logins for Active Directory users in SupportCenter Plus.
How to enable it in SupportCenter Plus?
1. Try to identify the two new icons in the Admin Page ( Refer Screen Shot). The Windows Domain Tab will allow you to add a new windows domain to SupportCenter Plus.
2. The Active Directory Tab will allow you to import users from Active Directory, enable active directory authentication and also specify the synchronization period.
3. The logins for the added Support Staff can be enabled in Support Rep Tab in the Admin Page. The logins can be combined with relevant roles.
Of Course there are some limitations with respect to AD Integration like the Single Sign On feature, but we are intended to provide this enhancement in one of the upcoming releases.Active Directory Integration will be one of the nicest additions to your Support because it will help in better utilization and also increase the security in login authentication.
Hope my blog post helped you in configuring the AD Integration.
Download the latest version of SupportCenter Plus Here for enabling these features. We had the starters, Main course and of course there should be a Dessert. Wait for the Hot on the Plate - III, untill its Sylvian Signing Off.
P.S: Feel free to buzz our support team at support@supportcenterplus if you have any problems in updating to the latest release.
@User Thanks for visiting our blog and commenting on it. Direct authentication and Single Sign-On is of course the second stage to AD Integration. We are looking at improving this feature in a better way. So will take all your suggestions in to consideration. @ Marc Specific Security groups is actually a nice idea. It will also help the admin for easy authentication. I have forwarded your suggestions to my developer team.
I'd second that. It would be great if you could authenticate against AD and perhaps to allow for configuring SupportCenter to only recognize AD accounts that are members of specific security groups so that from within AD I can manage who uses our SupportCenter system and what their rights/roles are. If that proves too difficult, and too Windows centric, then you could add authentication using RADIUS as it's easy to add system to handle RADIUS authentication requests using AD.
Looks like a start, but from my point of view its not good enough yet. I understand that this is just the beginning. I want: 1* Authentication directly agains AD/ldap. No sync. 2* Kerberos/SPNEGO support with ntlmv2 failover. 3* The SupportCenter daemon to use its own credentials when doing AD/ldap authentication. This is different in Windows and Linux, but at least in Windows this is possible. Depending on the current codebase this shouldn't be very hard to accomplish. Good luck!