Improve user management within the PTC support site and Precision LMS

[slapha]

Not sure if it's just me, but when managing the users for my company is always difficult.

I don't see any way to easily deactivate users. You can remove their access but they just sort of stick around unless you submit a ticket to get them disabled.

Also editing users sort of act like you're that user and have seen it get confused with my information versus the user I'm editing's information.

I'm also not able to update someone's account to add our customer number if they managed to create an account without one. I think we should have that ability if we recognize the person has a basic account and they should have a corporate account.

The whole UI/workflow could use a revamp and updated to more practical methods to support corporate administration of users.

It would also be beneficial if PTC Support and Precision LMS accounts could be managed from one place, not in two semi-connected databases. I can see cases where you may not want to give training or support to specific individuals but it's time consuming to go from site to site to set up both when it should all be tied to the customer number and approved access.

[JamesAvis]

15 months later.  How long is this implementation going to take?  I have about 500 active users, but our account has 9500 users.  The table for managing them is a joke, no sorting, no searching, no filtering, no exporting.  Copying and pasting into excel only works for their name and email, and that comes in as two lines per user, one for name, one for email.  PTC regularly grants license management permissions to anyone who asks for it, even though we have administrators and don't want people who can't follow simple instructions to mess with our licenses, but there's no way to see who all has it without slowly scrolling through the entire table. 

[PeterCase]

Hi @JamesAvis 

Thanks for sharing your experience with us. Reading through your post there are several things we can help you with already, based on changes we've made to Online Supervisor capabilities since the last update to this thread. 

Please find details under the headings below.

Searching / Filtering / Sorting as Online Supervisor, and determining users with License Management Privileges
The Manage Employee Privileges tool  is more suited to operations on smaller numbers of users (typically accounts with 100s, rather than 1000s of users). For Online Supervisors in larger organizations, we made some Mass Update features available in June last year.
To generate an export of users, we advise using the Search feature, and exporting results to csv.

This filter accepts wildcards for admins wanting a comprehensive list:

Using this method addresses several things:
1) Admins can avoid the "2 lines per user" problem that's present when copying and pasting from the Manage Employee Privileges tool.
2) Filtering capabilities and be run on the exported CSV. For example, filtering for the presence of "PtcCsPrivLmLicensing" in the ptccswebaccess field will generate a list of users with License Management Privileges in your organization.
3) The results can be used to generate a list of users to run mass updates on, using the new Manage Multiple Users and Permissions tool.

Other Improvements to Online Supervisor capabilities
Work is still ongoing at this time with Enhanced Access Approvals coming soon. Please look out for an announcement in the eSupport Help Community soon.

Current PTC Focus w.r.t. Identity Management
Our teams are focusing the majority of our efforts around Identity and Access Management at this time on enabling Single Sign on between PTC's SaaS Products and Digital Services like the tools in the My PTC Website.
For accounts which opt in to future federation capabilities, several common Online Supervisor tasks such as user management when employees offboard will become a thing of the past, as the accounts, when deactivated at our customer sites, will become dissociated and will no longer be able to access PTC's services. 

PTC Granting License Management Capabilities
Thank you for making us aware of this. PTC has a limited number of Operators in our Support Teams with ability to manage permissions on user accounts. Typically this is only used under specific circumstances (such as a last Online Supervisor has left the company).
I'll reach out under separate cover to understand how such changes happened. For clarity, permission assignment should be handled by Online Supervisors at our end customers. Users are able to see a list of Online Supervisors under eSupport Settings, and can reach out from there to request appropriate additional permissions.

[JamesAvis]

I've never tried searching for just "*" before, but that returns a maximum of 7000 results, even in the export, so I would have to refine it further to get the full list in parts.  In the end I am able to get what I need, through several exports and manipulation in Excel, then going back to the search tool to find and edit the permissions needing to change, but all of that still indicates a missing capability in the tool.

I like the sound of integration with SSO.  Will that work if we have no SaaS products?  There aren't going to be any for gov users for years more, still.

Regarding PTC support granting permissions without permission, the worst case I've seen was when someone who didn't even work here asked PTC for an upgraded account on our customer account, it was granted.  Then they saw my name as Online Supervisor when they tried to generate a license, so they told PTC they didn't know who I was and to make them the Online Supervisor instead, which PTC granted, taking away my Online Supervisor role and giving it to them.  This is a wild fringe case, I'm sure, but it serves as a good example of the need for PTC to rely on Online Supervisors as you talked about in the last section.