Multi-Customer Data Support


Overview

Tasks

Included with

Tivoli Service Desk

Overview

Multi-customer data support

Multi-customer data support is an optional feature of Tivoli Service Desk. It maintains data security and confidentiality for each organization supported in Tivoli Service Desk. The Tivoli Service Desk administrator decides whether or not to implement this feature and segment data by organization within a single Tivoli Service Desk database.

Multi-customer data support provides these benefits:

  • Confidential data is securely segregated based on the organization that initially contacted the help desk
  • Access to data is restricted by organization
  • Help desk outsourcers can track multiple organizations in one TSD database
  • Help desks for one organization can support multiple lines of business
  • Large distributed sites can more easily manage data

Organizations and data segmentation

Organizations are the identifiers used to segment data and to define access rights to data. Organizations can be groups of contacts, companies, lines of business, or business divisions.

The Tivoli Service Desk administrator assigns each user the ability to support certain organizations. TSD users can view data for each organization they support. All the organizations with which a TSD user is allowed to interact constitute the security domain for the user. TSD users cannot view protected data that falls outside their security domain.

Types of data secured

Multi-customer data support controls access to these data types:

More information

For a detailed explanation of multi-customer data support, see the Tivoli Service Desk 6.0 Administrator's Guide.

Tasks

Enabling multi-customer data support

The process of enabling multi-customer data support in a TSD installation is discussed in detail in the Tivoli Service Desk 6.0 Administrator's Guide.

In brief, the process involves:

  • Establishing an organizational structure
  • Assigning every person to an organization
  • Configuring supported organizations for every user
  • Creating at least one user, usually the TSD system administrator, with access to all organizations
  • Validating that existing data is compatible with multi-customer data support
  • Updating existing TSD records as necessary
  • Checking the effects of enabling multi-customer data support by running TSD in secure mode on one workstation
  • Enabling multi-customer data support for the entire TSD installation

Ongoing tasks

After the TSD administrator enables multi-customer data support, the following tasks are performed on an ongoing basis: