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Employees Should Have Access To Only The Brands They Are Associated With...
Idea shared by Ben Santiardo - 6/29/2015 at 5:46 AM
Completed
I've noticed that even though an employee is assigned to certain group (which are owned by a specific Brand) that when an employee is creating a new Ticket/CallLog/Etc, that they can see a list of all the Brands. If I assigned an Employee to the support group of a specific brand, I do not see a reason why they should be able to see other Brands/Departments. I would think that their assigned groups should dictate what they should see in dropdown lists.

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This is an issue that myself and others have brought up to them repeatedly. It makes no sense from a security layout point of view.
 
There is a lot of inconstancy within SmarterTrack with how it handles permissions and it's not very flexible. That Brand drop-down list should be filtered, but I'm pretty sure it's coded up as a simple list of the values in the Brands database table.
 
If they could get the system to only show tickets/info of the brand a person is assigned to, it would go a long long way towards giving a client back-end access to work cooperatively with the help desk and have access to their tickets without having to go through the time/effort and money of developing a page using Web Services to provide the same functionality.
 
However, they either ignore the issue, or comment that they will look into it. After 3+ years of seeing this topic come up and then die out I think we've mostly given up hope that this will ever be implemented.
 
The Organizations feature was toted as the feature that would bring this type of functionality in (it's a forum post if you search for it). Now that it's here, I found it doesn't even come close to providing an account holder the ability to view all the tickets for their brand. 
 
As of now, there is no way to limit what an agent can see as far as brands are concerned. And you'll notice this in other parts of SmarterTrack like Canned Replies and the KB portion. They also don't seem to follow any kind of permission level at all.
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I'll admit I found it very strange that it behaves this way. The information is there in the tables. As a programmer myself, I know it isn't that difficult to implement a filter based on what Brands the Agent is currently assigned to. Like you said, it seems to simply be a dump of what is found in the brands tables without any regard for security. This is something that would greatly improve security in the system and should be taken very seriously by SmarterTools and not pawned off as a "wish-list" item.
____________________________________ Ben Santiardo, Senior Programmer Analyst Eastern Suffolk BOCES
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Agreed. Sadly I feel it will be pushed to the wayside again. This topic gets brought up every so often (found this out when doing forum searches to find if there was a way to do it). And each time, they don't seem to grasp the positives.

SmarterTrack is very close to being able to do multi-client support like their competitors. If the security/permissions worked as one expected they would, they could sell more user licenses. As companies like ours would buy up more licenses as we could allow back-end management access to account holders, so they can work with our technicians on their client issues. See the progress of tickets, add notes, etc. All without having to deal with the web services. They could view reports on their own and only see what they are allowed to see.

List goes on, but in the end could mean more user license sales for them. But they just won't make a move on it and instead release a limp Organization feature, that we have yet to find a use for in our particular setup (can't speak for others).

Here's hoping for an attitude change on the matter.
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Employee Replied
1/26/2016 at 9:13 AM
Employee Post
Hello All,
Just thought i would let everyone know that this is a duplicate of:
https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a424/is-it-possible-to-restrict-a-user-to-a-specific-brands-portal.aspx
Thank you,
 
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Just so you know, both threads touch upon similar but different aspects. The thread you linked is talking about "User" accounts created and which Brand/Portal they have access to.

This thread is talking about "Agents/Employees" and which Brands/Department they have access to within dropdown lists.

They are both in similar lines regarding permissions and access restrictions, but both threads are referring to different areas of the web application.

Just wanted to clear that up just in case.
____________________________________ Ben Santiardo, Senior Programmer Analyst Eastern Suffolk BOCES
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User Replied
1/26/2016 at 10:36 AM
Oh! You are correct, sorry about that.
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User Replied
1/26/2016 at 10:50 AM
I think this feature does make sense, and I have added this to the feature list to be discussed for future versions as well :)
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That would make 19 votes for a feature like this. Hoping to see it make a future build...
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I agree with this idea :)
If you work collaborate with your partners company, I think you will like my idea here:
portal.smartertools.com/community/a88643/restricted-privileges-agent-to-see-only-customer-client-with-same-brand-where-customer.aspx
1
Employee Replied
8/7/2018 at 12:11 PM
Employee Post
Great news.... This functionality has been planned for the next major release of SmarterTrack! We'll post additional details as they become available. 
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Employee Replied
8/8/2018 at 2:03 PM
Employee Post
Hi Michael. An update has been added on that thread as well. Please check it out!
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Andrew Barker Replied
12/12/2018 at 9:49 AM
Employee Post
In SmarterTrack Build 6910, we made several adjustments to agent permissions. Among those changes, agents will only be able to create tickets and call logs for groups in the brand(s) that they are part of. Depending on how the various departments are configured – specifically the "Allow advanced search for all agents to return contents of this department" and "Allow all managers to see the contents of this department" settings – it is still possible for an agent to see tickets belonging to a brand that they are not a part of.
Andrew Barker Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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