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Authentication
Q. For SSO, why do you want a metadata URL? Why can't I just send you my metadata directly?
A. We prefer a metadata URL because we will continue to check your metadata URL for updates. If you make a change to your metadata, we'll see that change. If you send us a metadata file directly, we have no way to know when it needs to be changed and changing your metadata will be a slower, manual process.
Q. What is an EPPN?
A. EPPN stands for "EduPerson Principal Name" and comes from the eduPerson schema. We support Shibboleth, which is a way of using SAML based on eduPerson.
Q. Does your SSO support <<SSO Provider X>>?
A. We support the Shibboleth protocol, which is a variant of SAML. We do not have a complete list of all providers that support Shibboleth, but we do have a KB category with example SSO setup for several common providers.
Q. How do I set up SSO authentication for the sandbox first?
A. Once we have added your metadata URL, you can use the entity ID from that metadata URL in the sandbox and/or your production environments.
Email service
Q. Do you support IMAP?
A. As of October 1st, 2022, IMAP is being deprecated by Microsoft, and will not be usable when authenticating into email tools.
Q. When is the "error to" email used?
A. The "error to" email is only used for catastrophic email service issues, such as if we can no longer log in to the email account. Email messages may be sent to the unsuccessful folder without being sent to the "error to" email.
Q. Should I check the unsuccessful email folder?
A. Yes. Messages will show up there if they cannot be processed, and there are a variety of reasons for why they can't be processed.
Q. Do you delete old processed or unsuccessful emails?
A. No, neither the email replies service nor email monitors delete messages.
Q. How do you deal with spam tickets?
A. You may want to use your mail environment's filtering rules or mail rules to prevent spam from showing up into the folder that TeamDynamix checks. For that matter, there is no rule saying TeamDynamix has to check the Inbox folder--the process could instead check a different folder besides Inbox, and mail rules could place email into that folder.
People import
Q. Why isn't self-registration working?
A. If you are using SSO, please make sure that (1) you've mapped the first name, last name, and email attributes in your TeamDynamix SSO configuration, and (2) you're releasing these attributes for the person/people you're using to test. Sometimes organizations don't release these attributes--for example you may need to make changes so that student attributes are being released.
Q. Does the people import endpoint really take an .xlsx file?
A. Yes. Further it does data type checking based on Excel data types. If you send an organizational ID "001234" as a number, it will be parsed as "1234" not "001234". Please be careful with the data types you use.
Q. How do I write code to use the API?
A. As of 2017, we now have a People Import Utility that can use the API for you! You are still responsible for creating a .csv, .xls, or .xlsx file, but the importer will then send that file into TeamDynamix.
Q. I specified user type "User" but Customer records were created. How come?
A. Please make sure the column heading is "User Type" exactly--the heading must exactly match the sample import file. If you said "USER_TYPE" or "USER TYPE" or anything else, the column did not match, was skipped, and the default (Customer) was used.
Q. I am planning to load a very large number of people. Is there anything special I need to know?
A. Yes. First, always please test in the sandbox! Second, for your initial load, please work with your implementation consultant. Third, there is a limit to the size of the file you send. Typically when you have over 8,000 people, you may want to consider splitting people into multiple files of 8,000 records each. Fourth, consider who needs to be loaded as a user vs. a customer--a large number of user records can be harder to manage than a large number of customer records. Fifth, please budget for several days for your import--on average 1 day for each file. (In practice the files may load much more quickly.)
Email SMTP Server
Q. Do I need to allow any IPs for the email traffic?
Yes, see this KB for those IPs.