In the following chapter you will find detailed information about how to configure your ConSol CM system to grant access to CM.Track (the ConSol CM portal) to your customers.
CM.Track V1 is a ConSol CM add-on which has to be purchased separately.
Please note that for every CM.Track user (i.e., user profile), a ConSol CM license is required. Since numerous customers can log in to CM.Track using one user profile, you do not need a ConSol CM license for every customer. Please refer to section License Management for details.
CM.Track V1 is part of every default shipment of ConSol CM in versions 6.10.4 and below, so there are no new files that have to be deployed. However, the default function set of CM.Track provides basic functionalities (e.g., viewing a ticket list, creating a new ticket, seeing ticket details) and the pages have a CM standard layout. In order to use CM.Track as a powerful portal for customer access to the system, the layout should be adapted to a company's CD (corporate design), a process called Skinning. The forms and lists which are displayed for the customer might be modified and/or extended. Please contact our consulting team or your account manager if you would like to adjust CM.Track for your company in an optimal way.
The portal CM.Track is based on the REST API of ConSol CM. Please refer to the separate document ConSol CM REST API Documentation for details.
A customer who wants, or should, have access to your ConSol CM system using the portal CM.Track has to have a login and a password. Both can be initially provided by the engineer who edits the customer data using the ConSol CM Web Client, or the values can be imported automatically into the database.
The fields for the login and password of customers are Data Object Group Fields which are defined like any other Data Object Group Field and which have special annotations. If you are not familiar with Data Object Group Fields, please refer to section Data Object Group Field Management and GUI Design for Customer Data.
The access permissions of the customer are defined by assigning a user profile to the customer's account. The user profiles are managed by the ConSol CM administrator using the Admin Tool.
As one of the first steps, you have to define user profiles, i.e., profiles of access permissions to CM.Track. A CM.Track user profile is defined like a regular engineer (please see section Engineer Administration for details), but is marked as Track.
Figure 505: ConSol CM Admin Tool - CM.Track: User profile name
The user profile is then assigned to one or more roles to define the access permissions to queues and customer groups. For example you can set up a user profile (engineer) cmtrack_basiccustomers that has the role TrackAll. This role has read/write/append permissions for the queues Helpdesk_2nd_Level and ServiceDesk and has customer group permissions for three customer groups. Please note that
In our example, the role TrackAll has read access to all customer groups. In your system, it might be required to create different CM.Track roles with access to different customer groups. For a detailed introduction to role administration, please refer to section Role Administration.
Figure 506: ConSol CM Admin Tool - CM.Track: User profile - Role (queue permissions)
Figure 507: ConSol CM Admin Tool - CM.Track User profile - Role (customer group permissions)
With this approach, a customer with the CM.Track user profile cmtrack_basiccustomers can only see and add comments to tickets from those queues. Another user profile might have access to Sales tickets and/or to an FAQ queue.
The fields for login and password for a customer are regular Data Object Group Fields at the contact level. Please see section Setting Up the Customer Data Model for an introduction to Data Object Group Field management and GUI configuration for customer data.
Edit the fields which contain the customer data (if there are two levels: not the company level, but the contact level!):
One field for the login has to be created, annotation username = true.
Figure 508: ConSol CM Admin Tool - CM.Track: Annotation for login
One field for the password has to be created, annotation password = true. The annotation text-type = password guarantees that only stars/dots are displayed in the Web Client, not the clear text password.
Figure 509: ConSol CM Admin Tool - CM.Track: Annotation for password
The engineer working with the Web Client can then assign a user name, initial password, and a CM.Track user profile to every customer who should have access to the portal CM.Track.
Figure 510: ConSol CM Web Client - CM.Track users
Then customers can log in to the system and see their tickets. Please refer to the ConSol CM User Manual, section CM.Track for a detailed explanation on how to work with ConSol CM as a customer.
There are two mechanisms for performing user authentication:
Please refer to section CM.Track V1: Authentication Modes for the Portal for details.
Figure 511: ConSol CM.Track - Customer login
Figure 512: ConSol CM.Track - Ticket list
In some cases it might be required that customers log in to the ConSol CM portal CM.Track and have to have access not only to their personal tickets but to all tickets of their company. In this case, the role for the CM.Track user (user profile) should be assigned the permission Access tickets of the own company under Track User Permissions. Please refer to the section Role Administration for a detailed explanation.
Starting with ConSol CM version 6.10.0, CM.Track can be configured to offer a hyperlink for customers where a customer can reset his password. This is based on the template track-password-reset-template. Please refer to section Password Reset Template for Customers Using CM.Track V1 for a detailed explanation.
The password reset in CM.Track is only possible when the DATABASE mode is used. It is not possible when LDAP authentication is in operation. See section CM.Track V1: Authentication Modes for the Portal for an explanation of all possible authentication modes.