Tenancies Overview

Tenancies are individual sites within your Advance deployment. Tenancies are separate from one another: they have their own databases, configuration settings, allocated users, templates, work groups, and so on. Using tenancies, you can organize and separate the data for different areas of an organization. For example, a department within your organization may have their own tenancy, which other departments do not have permission to access. This is possible because users that can access one tenancy cannot automatically access another tenancy. In this way, you can define broad areas of user access in Advance.

Overview

Tenancies are managed using the Advance root application. Logging into this application provides you with a user interface to manage the tenancies and Site Administrators in your Advance deployment. Only Root Administrators can create and edit tenancies.

Tenancy Types

There are two types of tenancy in Advance. The type of tenancy selected determines how users authenticate with Advance. The tenancy types are:

  • Username/password (UNP) tenancy – users log in to the tenancy using a username and password
  • Active Directory (AD) tenancy – Advance automatically logs in users, using Active Directory

The tenancy type is selected during tenancy creation. It cannot be changed after the tenancy is created.

The main differences between the types of tenancy are:

  • Authentication – how users authenticate with Advance
  • User management – how user accounts are created and managed by site administrators

Authentication

In username/password tenancies, users authenticate with Advance by logging in with their username and password. In Active Directory tenancies, Advance automatically logs users in by checking the credentials of their current Windows session against a list of users.

User Management

In username/password tenancies, you create individual user accounts using the Advance user interface. You must provide the user's e-mail address and name.

In Active Directory tenancies, you import existing user accounts from Active Directory.

Site Administrators

Site Administrators are users with permissions to create, edit, and delete resources inside tenancies. The resources they can administer include:

  • Work groups
  • Templates
  • Users
  • User groups

A Site Administrator can also edit the site settings, for example to enable answer file downloads.

A Root Administrator can create, edit, and delete Site Administrators in the Advance root application.

Tenancy Databases

Each tenancy has its own database containing data specific to that tenancy. This includes data for work groups, templates, assembled documents, and so on. By default, tenancy databases are named using the format HDAdvance{tenancy}, where the tenancy moniker set when creating the database replace the {tenancy} placeholder. When installing Advance, the default format of databases names can be customized by changing the ApiSiteSettings.ConnectionStrings.TenancyDefaults setting in the Advance installer configuration settings file.

Tenancy Database Location

When you create a tenancy, you can select where you want Advance to create the database. You have the following options:

  • Same as Root – Advance will create the tenancy database on the same database server that hosts the Advance root application database; this is the database server specified for root during Advance installation
  • Customer specific – you specify connection details for a database server; Advance will create the database for the tenancy on this server

The Same as root option should be suitable for the majority of tenancies. The Customer specific option is recommended when it is necessary to separate the tenancy data from the root data. For example, if it is necessary to store tenancy data in a particular country.

Activated and Deactivated Tenancies

After a tenancy is created, you must activate the tenancy it to make it available to users. If a tenancy is not activated, users may not log in to the tenancy.

You can also deactivate a tenancy to make it unavailable to users. Deactivating a tenancy does not delete it: all tenancy data is retained. This includes databases, configuration settings, users, documents, and so on. You can re-activate a tenancy at any time.

Tenancy Reports

Tenancy reports are comma-separated values (CSV) files containing information about a tenancy. Advance provides the following reports:

  • All Tenancies report — information about the individual tenancies in Advance, including name, description, active users, and so on.
  • All Users report — information about users in Advance, including name, last login date, and the tenancies of which they are members.
  • Root user activities report — information about root user activities, including email address, action types (i.e., creating, editing, and deleting tenancies), and action descriptions.

Once downloaded, you can open the report CSV file using an application on your own computer. For example, using a spreadsheet application.

Automatic Approval of Uploaded Templates

By default, when you upload templates to a tenancy, you must manually approve the template to make it available to your users. If you do not want to perform this step – i.e. if you always want your uploaded templates to be immediately available to users – you can change the Is Template Approval Required setting when creating or editing a tenancy. Setting this to false means you no longer need to manually approve the template.

Common Tasks