QualityOne Vaults allow you to efficiently manage temporary, short-term access to your Vault for external collaborators by eliminating manual Vault account creation, activation, and inactivation. External collaborators with temporary access may respond to your organization’s requests using an external license from the same pool of external licenses. You can request responses from recognized external contacts, collaborate with those individuals in Vault, and finish with minimal to no need of managing user account provisioning for those external collaborators.
When you request collaboration from external contacts for supplier-related records, Vault automates the provisioning of External Collaborator accounts for those contacts and invites them to collaborate by sending specialized email notifications. A collaboration is complete when external contacts respond to all requests assigned to them. When collaboration is complete, Vault automatically inactivates external user accounts, freeing up external licenses for other new external contacts with collaboration requests to utilize for activation.
Depending on your Admin’s configuration, object, field, and section labels may appear differently than the labels mentioned in this article.
Note: This feature enables external users to collaborate on QMS objects. See Working with External Collaborators for Document Review & Approval for more details about External Collaboration for document review and approval.
About External Collaborators
For supplier-related records, you can identify a collaborator from an external organization by assigning a Person in the External Collaborator field. The External Collaborator field may be constrained to only Persons within the Organization involved in the record. For example, the organization in the Supplier field on the SCAR record.
Contact Lists
If configured by your Admin, you can define Persons related to an Organization record, creating a contact list for external collaborators. You can define contact lists by populating the Organization field present on Person records in your Vault.
About User Account Provisioning Automation
When you identify the Persons to assign supplier-related records to (by selecting the person in the External Collaborator field) Vault automatically activates or inactivates these users (Persons) from your Vault at specific lifecycle states within the Admin-configured lifecycle. When collaboration begins, Vault can automatically detect if the Person identified in the request’s External Collaborator field has a user account in your Vault and:
- If the Person does not have a user account, Vault creates an External User licensed user.
- If the Person already has a user account, Vault reactivates the existing user in Vault and allows the person to access the assigned supplier-related record according to the Person assigned in the External Collaborators field of the record.
When the collaboration in your Vault is complete, Vault automatically inactivates that user account either through an entry action configured by your Admin or when you remove or replace the Person in the External Collaborator field.
How to Replace External Collaborators
If an external collaborator becomes inactivated after being removed from the External Collaborator field, you can replace the collaborator with another Person that fits the constraints of the External Collaborator field manually. Depending on your Admin’s configuration, you can also use the Create & Activate External Collaborator user action in the appropriate lifecycle state to replace the external collaborator; this ensures your Vault triggers the user account provisioning automation.