Getting Started with People Records

This getting started article will help TeamDynamix Administrators to understand the difference in types of people records within the TDAdmin interface. The user should have administrative permission within the TDAdmin interface.

Overview

People records within TeamDynamix represent individuals that play a role on a project, incident, task, issue, etc. A People record might be a user assigned to a ticket, a resource assigned to a task, or a stakeholder on a project.

Where to Find This

People records are created within TDAdmin and are utilized within both TDNext and TDClient.

• TDAdmin is where administrators create People records.
• TDNext is where technicians will assign tickets to user by accessing the People record.
• TDClient is where users will login and create service requests that will be associated with their People record.

Navigate to People records following these paths:

• TDAdmin > Users & Roles > Users > Select a user to view their People record
• TDNext > Application Menu > People App > Search for a specific user to view their People record

Where to Start

People Classification

In TeamDynamix, there are two classifications of People records:

Users – Someone who can authenticate into a TeamDynamix application either through TDNext (Licensed User) or via TDClient (Client Portal). Technicians, Project Managers, IT Directors and the like would be Users.

Customer – Someone with just a contact record in TeamDynamix that can be listed, for example, as the Requestor on a ticket or Sponsor on a Project. A customer record is very much like an Outlook Contact. It typically contains just the contact's basic profile/demographic information.

Different Types of People Records

There are times when a person’s classifications might overlap, and different strategies may be used to manage the People records. 

The following are typical strategies to consider when creating different types of People in TeamDynamix:

Licensed Users (TDNext)

These individuals access the full-featured TeamDynamix application and are typically part of Information Technology and/or the Project Management Office. In many cases, these individuals will likely be created manually as part of the implementation process. Your TeamDynamix Implementation Consultant can also help you import them using the People Import Utility.

Once loaded, these users will typically have their profile information updated via Web APIs.

TD Client Users (Client Portal)

These individuals are typically requestors of “work” (projects, tickets, service requests) via the Service Catalog, stakeholders on a project that want to view status information, or consumers of information in the Knowledge Base. Most commonly, these users would be faculty, staff members, or even students that may have an interest in logging in to the Client Portal to review existing requests and submit new ones.

Depending on the quantity, it may make sense to manually create these users or work with your TeamDynamix implementation consultant to import these in bulk using the file-based B.E. (Business Entity) import tool. However, the creation of these TDClient users can also be automated via the TeamDynamix Self-Registration process (see below). The process automatically creates a user by checking, at the login attempt, if the individual exists as a TeamDynamix TDClient user. If the user does not exist, TeamDynamix can leverage an LDAP/AD connection to verify the user is part of the organization and then automatically create the account based on a standard profile.

Customers

These individuals are typically all other people in the organization that may or may not actually ever log in to the TDClient portal. However, it’s a good idea to have a customer record for these individuals because they will often still call-in or email the service desk or be a sponsor/stakeholder on a project. By having these individuals in as customers, a TeamDynamix user (e.g. Service Desk Technician) can easily look up the individual and add them to a work item. Otherwise, the technician would have to create the customer record on the fly, which may present accuracy challenges and become time consuming. 

If an individual is loaded up as a customer only, the self-registration process can still create a user account should the customer decide, at some point, that they would like access. 

Contacts

A final type of person is a Contact record. Contacts can be added to Projects or added on tickets. A contact can either be an existing person in the People application or created as a new person.

Project contacts only appear in the Projects system under the Contacts section, on tickets under the People section, and in the People application. The People application can be searched to only find Contact users.

Adding People Records

There are a couple different ways people can be added to the system. Usually the user type will dictate which method to use.

Manual User Creation

When new users come on board, they are manually added one at a time. This is also how you would probably get the initial group of users in the system that your organization purchased licenses for (technicians, enterprise users, etc.). Learn more about creating users manually in this Creating Users Manually & Applicable Settings article.

Importing or Updating Users Via the API

This is the TeamDynamix-recommended route for importing and updated your customers or clients. It is preferred since it handles the logic behind whether or not a user should be created or updated.

If you decide to not import them in as clients (these are end users that can instantly authenticate), you can import them as customers, and then use Self-Registration to convert them to clients as they attempt to login. 

Alternatively, Fiddler can be used to import the file to the API. Get the API documentation to a developer to allow them to start this process.

Learn more about using the TDWebApi people import API to sync users between your organization and TeamDynamix.

How People Records Can Be Created in TeamDynamix

Record Matching/Updating

Creation processes will attempt to match rows in the import file to existing users in the system. If existing records are found, they will be updated. If no existing records are found, new records will be created. The below matching logic is used to determine if a records should be updated or created.

1. Username - If there already exists one or more people, regardless of active status, with the same TeamDynamix username as a row that is being imported, those records will be updated from the spreadsheet. This field will only be used for the purposes of matching. TeamDynamix username fields will not be updated as part of this process.
2. Authentication Username - If there already exists one or more people, regardless of active status, with the same TeamDynamix authentication username as a row that is being imported, those records will be updated from the spreadsheet. This is the Auth Username specified for the user in the TDAdmin application. This field will only be used for the purposes of matching. TeamDynamix authentication username fields will not be updated as part of this process.
3. Organizational ID - If there already exists one or more people, regardless of active status, with the same organizational ID as a row that is being imported, those records will be updated from the spreadsheet.
4. Primary Email Address - If there already exists one or more people, regardless of active status, with the same primary email as a row that is being imported, those records will be updated from the spreadsheet.

User organizational IDs and primary email addresses will be updated as part of this process as long as they are not the fields which records are matched on.

Merging People Records

Merging duplicate person records is possible to do from TDAdmin by a person with full administrator privileges. This can be done by:

• Selecting two or more Customers to merge into a single Customer, or
• Selecting one User and one or more Customers to merge into a single User

When merging, you will choose a primary (destination) record which will be kept. The information on the primary record will not be changed as a part of the merge. The merge will simply remove the other duplicate records and reassociate those references to those records (like ticket requestor info) to point to the primary record. When complete, any non-primary people will be removed from the system entirely.

To merge people records:

1. In TDAdmin, navigate to Users & Roles > Merge People.
2. Enter the duplicate records to be merged in the Search field.
3. Click Merge. In the Type column, look for the profiles that you are trying to merge. Ensure that you are either merging Customer records into another Customer record or Customer records into a User record. User records cannot be merged together and they cannot be merged into a Customer record.
   • Customer(s) can be merged into another Customer
   • Customer(s) can be merged into another User
   • User(s) cannot be merged into another Customer
   • User(s) cannot be merged into another User
4. Check the boxes next to the duplicate records in the list and click the Merge button.
5. If you are merging Customers into a User record, the User record will always be the default primary record. If you are merging only Customer records, you will need to choose the appropriate record as the Primary record before continuing.
6. Review the help text below the list of records to be merged to understand the details of what the merge will do.
7. Click the Merge button to complete the merge action.

Handling Duplicate User Records

If two Users were created in error and need to be merged, then there are two solutions for this since two users cannot directly be merged:

1. Leave one active and deactivate the other. This does not require a merge action. To deactivate:
   • Click on the User record.
   • Click on the red Deactivate button.
2. Downgrade one of the users to a Customer and then merge the two using the instructions above.
   To downgrade a user:
   • In TDAdmin, navigate to Users & Roles > Users.
   • Select the user.
   • Click Actions > Convert to Customer.

Gotchas & Pitfalls

• Imports should ALWAYS be done first in your Sandbox environment. Once you create a user record, you cannot delete it, you can only deactivate it. Cleanup of improperly imported data is very time consuming and can hold up the implementation of your project.
• Speak to your implementation consultant if you have any questions about this process.