How can other departments at our organization share our subscription?

With each subscription, you get unlimited access to the chat, FAQ, and 3mail modules. Unlimited access = unlimited departments!

Since each subscription allows you to create unlimited numbers of users and queues, you can include other departments easily using the regular tools within the admin dashboard. You can easily set up one or more new queues for the additional department, create user accounts, and assign the department's users to their queues.  So you can share your subscription, OR the other department can take out a separate subscription.

There are some practical considerations of which you should be aware when sharing a subscription:

• Privacy: Any user account with full administrative privileges can see all users, queues, chat box skins, chat code snippets, and chat data, including transcripts (if enabled), within the entire subscription. Regular user accounts with no special privileges can only see transcripts on queues to which they are assigned, so staff with non-admin-level accounts won't be able to see data for the other departments. 
• Operational: All users and queues within a subscription are visible to each other for transfers.
• Increased management complexity: If you add additional permissions levels to your subscription, then there is a bit of additional administrative responsibility, especially if you decide to keep chat operator internal contacts separated by department.

The "mini-admin"

In order to provide some degree of isolation for a department operating within a subscription, you can designate one or more users as "mini-admins" for that department. The mini-admin can manage their own department's queues, users, widgets, transcripts, etc, and the mini-admin cannot see any data (including transcripts) for the rest of the subscription. However, any user with full administrative privileges will be able to see all of the data for the mini-admin's department.

For example, if a campus library controls the subscription, the admissions department can designate one or more mini-admin users that will only be able to manage the chat service for the admissions department. The admissions department's mini-admin will not be able to see any data from the library. But the library will always be able to see the admissions department's data, since the library possesses at least one user account with full administrative privileges.

Additionally, all users and queues for the library and the admissions department will appear for transfers. This is beneficial if the departments often refer users to each other. However, this can be a little confusing if the service grows large. The best way to keep it purely beneficial and avoid confusion is to work out a naming convention for users and queues. That way, the transfer lists will be easy to understand. Example: lib-pam, admissions-amy.

Setting up a mini-admin

Do you want to keep ALL contacts (chat buddies) separated by department?

In order to keep contacts separated, we recommend that each department have its own folder. In the instructions above for setting up a mini-admin, the newly added department (admissions) was given a folder and it's users were placed inside that folder. It is also good practice to create a folder for the original department (the library in our example above) and place that original department's users and queues inside this new folder.

Once each department has its own folder within the subscription, you can manage the contacts for users and buddy users by folder which will ensure that only those users within a departmental folder are buddied with each other.

Additional departments operating separately

If the other department needs to operate separately from your subscription, because of privacy or other concerns, that is no problem. The other department should register a trial and then contact us for pricing details.

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