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Nervous to upgrade WHD - Tech account logins

Hi there,

I am running WHD 12.5.1 and it works fine. I see 12.7.1 has a few features I'd like though but I have been putting off upgrading due to the change in tech account logins. However I am confused as to what the change actually is based on release notes and posts in the forum.

Am I understanding correctly that upgrading to 12.7.1 (I actually think the changed happened in 12.5.2) will mean my tech accounts cannot log in with AD credentials? All my tech accounts are linked to client accounts but if I am understanding correctly AD authentication will stop working for my tech accounts after I upgrade. I am also worried if that's the case, that I will be locked out of help desk after I upgrade, though I guess I could make a non-AD account though I don't have a spare license.

Anyone able to clarify?

Thanks

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Accepted answers

slvandewalle

Hello,

Techs will still be able to login with their AD credentials as the credentials can still be synced to their linked client, however, you will need to make sure that the username associated with the techs is different than what is associated with the client account. The main complaint I have heard from my techs is that if they don't set a password for their tech account they need to delete the auto-filled username and enter their AD credentials. It will still open the tech interface for them if that was the last one that they accessed.

Below is an example of how I implemented this change. I did this to the accounts prior to installing the update

Hope this helps!

All comments

slvandewalle

Hello,

Below is an example of how I implemented this change. I did this to the accounts prior to installing the update

Hope this helps!

andrewbsd

Thank you for the reply.

andrewbsd

Playing around with this on my account before I upgrade. You are right it auto fills in the username_tech rather than default so you have to wipe that out each time to log in. You had mentioned setting a password for your tech account, how do you do that? And my guess here is you would have to set it to the same as your AD account to make it seamless, but to me that is just a security risk in of itself.

Thanks again

j_a_catlin

The tech needs to use the linked client login if authentication for the tech is set to use LDAP. If you are ok with the tech not using LDAP authentication then you can set the techs password under the tech->my account section. That password doesn't need to match the AD account.

andrewbsd

Thanks for the clarification. Kind of an annoying change then, as I'm sure that will bug users. Might just hang out on 12.5.1 until they make that cleaner (yes I realize that may be a while!)

cgsservicedesk

We have all of our Techs linked to Clients also, I found that when we went to 12.7 I just had to change the Tech username from their user ID to something different (I just made it the same as the tech's name) and that was it, everything behaved as before. I recall at the time thinking this wasn't how they said it would work, but I'm not complaining. Yet another thing that made 12.7 such a piece of garbage.

andrewbsd

But when a tech logs out (or is timed out) doesn't their username autofill the different tech name that you have set? So the user has to wipe that out and put in their regular client username (linked to AD, in our case).

It's not a big deal for me but we have multiple departments using Help Desk and I can forsee tonnes of complaints coming my way with that change! Unless 12.7 handles it differently, I just tested on 12.5.1 by changing my tech account username and that's how it handles it.

cgsservicedesk

It doesn't seem to work that way, which I find confusing but convenient. We have our techs set to 500 minutes and have "Disable Tech Session Timeouts for Open Windows" ticked so being logged out isn't much of an issue, and we log in via Single Sign-On, and it just works. Please don't jinx me

percyplant

Sounds like the web browser is caching the username autofill, so users will need to empty their browser cache or remove the entry from the Credential Manager control panel.

slvandewalle

It is auto-filling the Tech username, not the client's username that is linked with the tech and synced to AD. Now that I think about it a bit more I think that this is likely WHD remembering the login ID. That is set under General > Authentication > Authentication Settings.