Partners are organizations, groups, customers, and so on, that have an interest in one or more deployed assets that are managed by the Axeda® Platform. A partner may be the support organization for your assets. Occasionally, this partner would need access to the Axeda® Connected Product Management Applications to remotely manage, troubleshoot, or repair your assets.
Axeda Applications users are defined in user groups that have been created in the primary directory service for the Platform. They have their own Applications login accounts and have privileges granted through the user group settings. Partners are defined in a secondary directory service (outside the Axeda Platform) and provided with limited access to Axeda Applications. Each partner has associated privileges and those privileges control access for contacts of that partner.
For example, through Axeda® Case Management you can create a case and assign it to a partner. The Platform sends the case information to the specified partner. Part of the information sent includes a login code which provides the partner's contacts with privileges and access to the Axeda Applications. A partner contact cannot log in to the Axeda Applications until her or she receives the login code and Axeda Applications URL for the asset to be managed. The partner contact will log in and then provide the login code created for the partner login session. The partner contact is restricted by the amount of time he can use the Axeda Applications, and the actual tools he is permitted to use.
When assigning the case, only partners associated with the related asset group will be available for assignment. A contact of that partner will be able to log in to the Applications to use the tools and information to resolve the case.
From the Axeda Applications, you can create or remove partners, view the defined partners, and view partner login sessions, and specify contacts for partners.
Users can enable or disable partners through the Axeda Administration application. (By default, partners are created as enabled.) When a partner is disabled, any login sessions assigned to that partner but to which contacts for that partner are not yet connected are closed, and the status of those login sessions changed to "Finished". If a partner is "disabled" while connected to a login session, the connected contact will be able to complete the login session without interruption.
Contacts for a disabled partner will not be able to log in to the Axeda® Platform, even with a valid login code and login account. Only contacts of enabled partners can log in to the Axeda® Platform.
When you create or edit a case, you can assign one or more partners to the case. Cases are created for specific assets. The ability to create a login session for a partner/partner contact depends on asset privileges for that partner. You can only assign a case to a partner who has privileges to the asset for the case, based on asset group assignments.