Creating an Active Directory Tenancy

An Active Directory tenancy is a type of tenancy in HotDocs Advance that uses your own Active Directory to authenticate users.

A tenancy is an individual instance of Advance within your Advance deployment, used to enforce separation of data. Each deployment of Advance will have at least one tenancy. You will need to create a new tenancy when you first deploy Advance.

See Creating a tenancy if you want users to authenticate using a username/password rather than Active Directory.

Prerequisites

• Install HotDocs Advance

To create an Active Directory tenancy

1. Open a web browser and navigate to the Advance root application; this application has a URL like https://yourorganization.com/HdaRoot
2. Log into the application; if you are logging in for the first time, you should use the initial username and password set in the Advance installer configuration settings file.
3. Click the Manage Tenancies link.
4. Click the Create a new AD tenancy link.
5. Type the tenancy details into the Tenancy form:
   1. Name – the friendly name for the tenancy, displayed in the UI.
   2. Description – a brief description of the tenancy and its purpose.
   3. Domain – the name of the Active Directory domain you want to connect to Advance.
   4. AD user group (optional) – the name of the Active Directory group containing the users you want to import into Advance; if you enter a user group, only users from that group can be imported into this tenancy. If you leave this field blank, you can import any user group in the domain specified above onto the new site later on.
   5. Moniker – a name used internally by Advance to refer to the tenancy; for example, this is the name displayed in the URL for the tenancy.
6. Specify DB – select from the following options:
   • Same as Root – create the database for the tenancy on the same database server as your deployed Advance instance.
   • Customer specific – create the database for the tenancy on a different database server.
7. If you selected the Customer specific option:
   1. In the Data Source field, type the connection string for the SQL Server instance you want to use.
   2. In the Use Sql Server Authentication drop-down menu, select from the following options:
      • Trusted – connect to SQL Server using Windows Authentication.
      • SQL username and password – connect to SQL Server using a username and password.
   3. If you selected the SQL username and password option, type your information into the following fields:
      • Username – username for a user with dbcreator permissions on the specified SQL Server instance.
      • Password – the password for the user specified above.
   4. Click the Test Connection button; a message appears to confirm that Advance can connect to SQL Server.
8. Click the Create button; once the tenancy is created, its details appear on-screen.
9. (Optional) Click the Activate button to make the tenancy accessible to users; you can also perform the activate tenancy step later if you do not want the tenancy to be immediately accessible.