Agents and Customers

FootPrints supports different levels of user privileges for users with different needs.  An “Agent” user account is intended for specified internal users, such as help desk Agents, customer service representatives, or engineers.  A “Customer” account is intended for employee end-users or external Customers, allowing those users to submit and track their own requests and to search the knowledge base.

FootPrints comes with a number of built-in user types, called “roles”. Custom roles can also be created by the Administrator to define permissions for different groups of users.

Here is a breakdown of the built-in roles:

• Agent roles:
• Agent—A standard, full-strength user.  This user type commonly includes: help desk Agent, call center Agent, developer, engineer, manager, and project member.  Agent users have the ability to use all of the basic functions of FootPrints, including creating, viewing, and editing Issues and running queries.  
• Project Administrator—In addition to Agent privileges, a Project Administrator can administer an existing Project, including adding custom fields, setting options, and adding users.
• System Administrator—In addition to Agent and Project Administrator privileges, the System Administrator has control over the whole FootPrints system, including administration of any Project, adding new Projects, and managing licenses.
• Customer roles:
• Read KB—View and search the Knowledge Base.
• Read KB/Requests—View and search the Knowledge Base and check the statuses on Requests (entered by an internal user or via email).
• Read/Submit—In addition to the functionality described above, can submit Requests via a FootPrints web interface.
• Read/Submit/Edit—In addition to the functionality described above, these users have limited edit privileges of their own Requests.

More About Customers

Customer users have a number of components:

• User Account—This is the ID and password of the Customer. Users can have unique IDs and passwords or they can share a generic ID and password. This record is kept in the password file.
• Contact Record—The contact information for the user is kept in the FootPrints Address Book or dynamically read from an LDAP or other External Database/SQL source. The data kept depends on the fields that exist in the Address Book.
• Primary Key—The Customer user account and contact records are linked via the Primary Key field. This is a field in the Address Book, such as User ID or Email Address, that uniquely identifies the user.
• Role—The permission level for the user.  Built-in and custom roles are available.