Contact Expert v7.1 for Skype for Business Server

Multi-tenancy in Contact Expert

Overview

Multi-tenancy is an architectural concept where a single instance of the application and its related infrastructure is able to serve multiple clients (companies, subsidiaries, departments, branches, etc) separately, meaning the clients have no idea whether there are other clients using the system or not. Each client is called a tenant.

A Contact Expert implementation serving one or more tenants is called a CE deployment.

No separate hardware and operating system software licenses are required for serving multiple tenants (companies or highly separated organizational units), and deployment administrators can manage all tenants from a single administration interface.

Functional Overview

Multi-tenancy is built around the access control solution with which the administrator can define to which resource types the user has access in general, and on what group level can they access the actual instances of those resource types in particular.

Group Levels

Each resource type is associated with a specific group level. For example, the Human Agent resource is associated with the Team level. Each particular Human Agent resource should be linked to an actual Team. For example, the Licenses resource type is associated with the Tenant level meaning that a License resource must have a Tenant associated, therefore Licenses are shared on Tenant level, they are visible for each relevant processes or objects within that tenant, but they are not visible for objects and processes in other tenants.

It is also defined on which group level a specific resource type is shared.

There are 4 group levels in CE:

1. Deployment
2. Tenant
3. Business Unit
4. Team

Deployment

A deployment is a single Contact Expert installation on one or more physical servers. It shares a single CE database and separates Tenants, Business Units and Teams logically.

Each Contact Expert deployment comes with a default deployment Super Administrator who has access to every resource on the deployment level. This user might create any number of additional deployment portal users and assign them roles to the deployment level resource types by default. The deployment level administrator also has permission to create Tenants and have access to all tenant level resources as well.

Tenant

Tenants represent individual clients (corporations) who use CE as a single instance of software that runs on a physical (or cloud-based) server which serves multiple tenants. A tenant does not require using physically separate hardware and database. They might be separate departments or organizational units within the same corporation that have distinct contact databases (for example Customer Services and Internal Technical Helpdesk).

Business Unit

Business Units (BUs) represent organizational units that share customer database, but have separate business processes and agent pools (for example Customer Care, Collection and Sales).

Team

This defines to which agents a portal user (Supervisor) has access to. It helps filtering multiple teams of agents in reports.

Team assignment does not affect an agent's association to queues or campaigns.

Separation Levels

This architecture provides three separation levels:

1. Deployments separate physical CE server hardware and MS SQL database (this is handling multiple tenants without using multi-tenancy feature).
2. Tenants logically separate data (customers) and processes (business flows) within the same physical CE servers and database.
3. Business units separate processes, but not data. Business Units share a customer database.

Administration of Tenants

Please read the following section on how to create and maintain Tenants and other parts of the organization hierarchy: Organizational Hierarchy Management.