Overview of Partner Delegations

EmpowerID 2018 Documentation / Identity Administration / Partner Access / Current: Managing Partner Delegations Overview

If your organization has partners that need to access your system to manage the IT resources you have allocated to them (such as onboarding employees, adding people to groups, creating new user accounts, etc.), you can create special EmpowerID locations, known as "Organization" locations, for those partners and assign to the people within those locations one or more of the "Partner" Management Roles EmpowerID provides out of the box. Combining these locations and Management Roles with a Business Role and Location assignment, allows you to give partners the ability to fully manage their domain without exposing to them your IT infrastructure. In this way, you can have multiple partners conducting business within your enterprise without those partners having an awareness of one another or of the resources internal to your organization. We discuss in further detail below how each of these aspects of the partner relationship work together.

Partner Management Roles

As mentioned above, EmpowerID provides "Partner" Management Roles out of the box. These roles are the Partner Admin Management Role and the Partner User Management Role. Each is configured with Access Levels for a subset of resources commensurate with the role. The Partner Admin Management Role give assignees administrative capabilities over aspects of their domain, with the Partner User Management Role gives assignees the ability to perform basic actions, such as searching for people, requesting access to resources and initiating several workflows.

Partner Admin Management Role

This Management Role gives assignees of the role the ability to manage the people and resources in their partner locations.

Assignment Type: Person Relative Resource

Assignment Type: Direct

Partner User Management Role

This Management Role gives assignees of the role access to the resources in their partner locations.

Assignment Type: Direct

Organization Locations

Organization locations are special location types that differ from other EmpowerID locations in that the relative "In My Organizations" Access Levels, such as the "People In My Organizations" Access Level granted to the Partner Admin Management Role, have no effect if assigned to people in other location types.

When people are assigned to an Organization location via a Business Role and Location assignment, the RBAC compiler determines their relative access and limits them as actors to those resources in their Organization location and any Organization locations below theirs in the Organization tree. They cannot act on resources above their location (see the below image and discussion). This limitation, however, does not apply to people as resources. As resources, people belong to all Organization locations in the tree, including the parent. This allows people in top-level Organization locations to act on those below them.

Visually this can be represented as follows:

In the image, the triangle represents the partner organization in it's entirety. Within the organization, there is a top-level parent Organization location and a person belonging to that location with the "User Admin" Business Role (depicted by the figure outlined in green). As this person belongs to the root location, the RBAC compilation of "People in her Organizations" includes the people in the root as well as all the people in the locations below the root. Thus, she can manage all users in the partner organization (represented by the green arrows).

In addition to the User Admin at the root or top-level Organization location, there is a person with the User Admin Business Role (depicted by the figure outlined in blue) at a sub Organization location. As this person belongs to a location below the parent, the RBAC compilation of "People in his Organizations" includes only those people in his sub Organization location and below. Thus, he can manage all users in those locations, but not any of those in the locations above his (represented by the blue arrow). And because he is also a resource, he can be managed by the User Admin at the parent location. This structure allows partner organizations to have sub-Organization locations with their own self-contained management capabilities that can be altered as needed by those in the top-level Organization.

Partner Business Roles

As mentioned in the above discussion, managing the access of your partners involves another component, the Business Role. In the EmpowerID RBAC model, Business Roles and locations intersect to provide scope in access assignments. All people must have a Business Role and all resources must belong to a location. In partner delegations, the EmpowerID RBAC compiler uses partner Business Role and Location assignments to determine the relative access to resources the people in those Business Roles and Locations have.

By default, EmpowerID includes two partner Business Role and Location combinations: Partner Admin in Partners and Partner in Partners. These Business Roles and Locations are assigned to the Partner Admin and Partner User Management Roles, respectively. This means that any person assigned to those Business Role and Locations receive the Access Levels granted to those Management Roles. We demonstrate how this works in the Managing Partner Delegations topic.