One of the most important, and yet often most frustrating jobs is onboarding new customers.
- Onboarding is often a large project and very manual
- Once onboarded many processes are still unique per customer
- Atria has many ways to onboard customers, and it can be confusing
- For Dedicated or Single Tenant customers and Azure AD we have new tools
The webinar below is designed to help you be the most efficient MSP you can be when onboarding customers.
The entire webinar is below, and timecodes for each section are embedded in the blog post below.
Key Scenarios
Hybrid with a single app
In this scenario the customer wishes to retain their AD and consume a single service from you. This was particularly common with Hosted Exchange, and is becoming more common with specialist remote app hosting partners delivering solutions like ERP’s and line of business apps using RDS or Citrix Virtual Apps
This Scenario also caters for when you are migrating users from an on-premises AD to one you fully manage. You might need to migrate users in batches while keeping both AD’s and Passwords in Sync.
The tool and process in this case uses AD-Sync, which can synchronise users and passwords from an on-premises AD to Atria
Taking over a whole AD
In this scenario you have won a new customer, with an existing AD – either on-premises or hosted in a datacentre, Azure or AWS. You and the customer have agreed it’s in good shape, and you want to manage it in place, while using Atria to give your helpdesk consistency of management processes, and the customer the ability to self service users, apps and passwords.
This is common when onboarding a medium to enterprise customer, where bringing them into the multitenant AD will offer minimal cost savings. It is also common when the customer has additional security requirements, common in Financial Services and Healthcare.
In this scenario we use the User Directory Import tool, which offers an AD browser where you can select users to import into Atria, either in place, or moving the users into a more organised structure in the same AD.
From Azure AD
Nowadays it is very common for customers to have Azure AD – generally because they have Office 365. You have won a customer and they have an existing tenant with active users and licenses. You want to bring them into Atria for consistency of helpdesk experience, reducing the amount of people that need admin access to the tenant and for license management. You may also be offering additional value-added services such as app hosting.
Another reason this may be the best option is when the customers on-premises AD is old and messy from years of poor maintenance. Alternatively, you may have limited access to the AD due to customer staff changes or the previous support organisation not handing over. In this case you will often find Azure AD to be the tidiest and most easily accessible way to get good clean user data – well maintained as every user has a license cost.
Here we use Azure AD-Sync to synchronise users from Azure AD into Atria, either in your shared (multi-tenant) AD or into a new Dedicated AD you have created. We also pull licenses into Atria against users for future management.
Migrating AD’s
By far the most common scenario is when you are migrating users from an On-Premises one to one managed by you, either Shared or Dedicated. Often the data is messy and needs tidying up, or the customer provides a new list of users and services they need. The on-premises environment may be so old, or so fragile you do not want to touch it at all.
You will often massage the data, do a test import, make changes, validate, and reimport sometimes many times. If it’s a larger customer, you might migrate in batches. Often the data is coming from a third-party system – payroll or workforce management so is incomplete and needs adding to.
Importing using a CSV with our bulk import tool is the right path here. It will upload users, with any standard AD fields, and you can add your own custom. If revisions need to be made you can download the existing user’s data into a csv, update and reupload.
…..And the API
And sometimes you just need more.
The Atria API is incredibly powerful, and can be used to import and create users, create and import AD groups, and assign services.
You can integrate it with your own scripting for transform and import on the fly, plug into other systems like workforce management tools, or helpdesk workflow tools.
Using the API is complementary to all the methods above to extend what you are doing, to add services, to put users into groups, to bundle steps together.
Watch the Webinar
Recommended Reading
- How to Import users with the Bulk Import Feature
- How to add additional fields in Bulk User Import
- Training webinar covering the Microsoft Online Service
- Synchronising Atria with Azure AD
- How to Install AD Sync
- AD Sync Tool Usage Guidelines
