CM/Track

Introduction to CM/Track

CM/Track is a ConSol CM add-on which provides a portal, which the customers can use to create cases, view their cases and perform certain actions for their cases, e.g. add comments and attachments and execute activities. In addition, a FAQ feature can be used to help the customers to solve their requests on their own. CM/Track has to be purchased separately. You need one license for each portal user profile (see Regular users vs. CM/Track profiles). Several customers can log in with the same user profile.

Granting access to CM/Track

You must enable the communication between ConSol CM and CM/Track by setting the following security-related system properties to appropriate values for your setup:

• cmas-restapi-core, csrf.request.filter.enabled

• cmas-restapi-core, csrf.domain.white.list

• cmas-restapi-core, csrf.domain.allow.none

Granting access to CM/Track involves the following steps:

1. Determine the authentication method, see Authentication. The available methods are database authentication, LDAP authentication and SSO authentication.

2. Create a CM/Track user profile with the permissions for the desired queues and the customer group which the contacts belong to, see Users.

3. Select whether the assignment of the user profile to the actual contacts should be manual or fixed in the CM/Track user assignment field of the customer group, see Customer groups.

4. Configure contact fields with the login information, see Defining the credentials for CM/Track. The required fields depend on the selected authentication method.

5. Fill out the login data for the individual customers on their contact pages. If the user profile assignment is not fixed, you also need to select the appropriate CM/Track user profile in the Portal user profile field.

If the customer should also see cases which have an additional contact from another customer group, the system property cmas-core-security, contact.inherit.permissions.only.to.own.customer.group must be set to “false”.

Data availability for customers

When configuring CM/Track for your customers, you need to decide which part of the information stored in the customers’ cases you want to share with the customers and which information should be kept internal. There are two aspects which need to be handled for this purpose:

• Case history entries: comments, emails and attachments
• Case fields

Visibility of history entries

The visibility of case history entries is configured using text classes, see Text classes. Only comments, emails and attachments which have a text class with specific settings are visible for the customer when he views a case. Two settings can be used:

• All entries are visible to the customer

• Only emails (incl. email attachments) with the customer as sender or recipient are visible to the customer

Comments and attachments which are added by the customers themselves using CM/Track are visible by default because the default text class for content from CM/Track, which has set All entries are visible to the customer, is automatically applied. In addition, you can select Only emails (incl. email attachments) with the customer as sender or recipient are visible to the customer for your default text classes for incoming emails, outgoing emails and attachments to ensure that the customers are able to see their own emails.

When the user wants to share additional comments, emails or attachments with the customer, he needs to set a text class which is visible to the customer to the respective history entry.

Visibility of case fields

The visibility of case fields in CM/Track can be configured for case field groups and single case fields by using settings. In addition, the visibility is affected by system properties and the active client configuration.

The following sections describe the different places where the configuration is made and their combination.

System properties

The value of cmas-restapi-core, security.fields.customer.exposure.check.enabled determines whether the case field settings are checked or not.

• true: The customer can only see the case fields which are explicitly set to visible in CM/Track.
• false: The customer can see all case fields in CM/Track.

Settings

The settings which are assigned to case fields are only considered if the system property cmas-restapi-core, security.fields.customer.exposure.check.enabled is set to true. They can be assigned to case field groups or case fields:

• Case field groups:
  Setting Availability via REST with the following values:
  • Full access: The fields in this case field group are displayed in CM/Track and their values can be modified.
  • Read-only access: The fields in this case field group are displayed in CM/Track.
• Case fields:
  Setting Availability via REST with the following values:
  • Full access: The case field is displayed in CM/Track and its value can be modified.
  • Read-only access: The case field is displayed in CM/Track.
  • No access: The case field is not displayed in CM/Track.

The value of the setting on field basis overwrites the value of the group setting. In this way, you can fine-tune the visibility of single fields within a group.

The settings Visible (for case field groups) and Visibility (for single case fields) will work in any case and are stronger than the Availability via REST (for case field groups) and Availability via REST (for single case fields) settings, i.e. when a group or field is set to invisible, it will not be displayed, no matter the availability via REST.

Client configuration

The JSON client configuration also influences which fields are displayed in CM/Track. The setting expandable in the layout options, determines whether all fields with the corresponding settings are displayed or not.

• true: Case fields which are not explicitly mentioned in the JSON layout attribute but which are set to be available will be displayed.
• false: Only case fields which are explicitly mentioned in the JSON layout attribute are displayed.

Fields which are mentioned in the JSON layout attribute but are not set to be available are not shown in CM/Track.

See Client configurations.

Combinations

The following table shows the effect of the different combinations on a certain field.

• System property: value of security.fields.customer.exposure.check.enabled

• Client configuration: value of expandable

• Settings: setting of Availability via REST in the field, if not set, setting of Availability via REST for the field group

System property	Client configuration	Availability setting	Effect
false	false	*	The case field is only displayed if it is mentioned in the layout attribute of the client configuration.
false	true	*	The case field is displayed.
true	*	no	The case field is not displayed.
true	false	yes	The case field is only displayed if it is mentioned in the layout attribute of the client configuration.
true	true	yes	The case field is displayed.

FAQs in CM/Track

You can use the FAQ functionality of CM/Track to create FAQ entries, which cover common problems and questions, so that the customers can look for a solution by themselves before creating a new request. Each FAQ entry is a case in a dedicated FAQ queue. The CM/Track users can access the FAQs by clicking FAQ in the main menu. The FAQ page includes a list of entries and a search field. If there are several FAQ queues, the users can filter the entries by queue.

You need to perform the following steps to implement the FAQ feature:

1. Create an FAQ workflow on the Workflows page.

2. Create a queue for the FAQ workflow on the Queues page. The checkbox FAQ must be selected for the queue. As FAQs do not need any customer, you can select None for the Customer assignment. In addition at least one text class which has the checkbox Visible for customers selected must be assigned. This text class must be applied to all the comments which should be visible to the customers in CM/Track.

3. Create a role with view permissions to the FAQ queue on the Roles page. If a customer group is assigned to the queue, the role must also have view permissions for this customer group, even though the customer is not displayed in CM/Track.

4. Create a CM/Track user profile on the Users page and assign it to the created role.

5. Assign the created CM/Track user profile to the customers in the Web Client by selecting it in the Portal profile field on the contact page.