Linked Accounts

Which problem do Linked Accounts solve?

It sometimes happens that there's a need for one user to temporarily "jump" to another account. Examples:

• Clause9 only allows for a single administrator account, which is typically assigned to a senior lawyer or to a member of the IT-team. However, in some organisations, multiple senior lawyers divide the administration tasks, or backups are required during holidays.

• In most organisations, when Single Sign On (SSO) is activated, users will automatically end up at their personal account. However, if a lawyer would simultaneously like to have a personal account and act as the administrator for the team, there must be an easy way to jump between accounts.

• In an international law firm, there may exist multiple separate databases with templates and clauses, e.g. one dedicated to the Spanish office with content in Spanish, and one dedicated to the French office with content in French. There may also be a need for a joint account in English, e.g. for joint projects. In such scenario, three different "customers" would typically be created (Spanish + French + joint), but there will be a need for users to be able to jump from their main account to the secondary shared account.

ClauseBuddy allows users to easily jump between accounts by having multiple security codes, and then using the menu at the top to jump between accounts. However, such security codes have two drawbacks:

• Users don't like keeping track of security codes, similar to how users don't like keeping track of passwords.

• Security codes conflict with the ideas behind SSO.

Creating a linked account

The system of Linked Accounts allows certain users to "jump" to some other account, either from the same customer, or even from some other customer. That other customer may even be located on a completely different physical server.

Linked accounts can only be created by an administrator, by going to the Linked Accounts tab of the configuration panel.

When you click on the green New linked account button, a new row will be added, in which you can choose a source user (left side) who is then allowed to jump to another user (right side):

For example, if you would like user Robbert Jacobs to temporarily jump to the administrator account, you would do the following, and hit the Save button.

⚠️ There is one extra step that must not be forgotten: the Switch to linked account right must also be activated for Robbert, otherwise the jump-related menu will not appear in the top bar of ClauseBuddy when Robbert logs in.

If Robbert logs in, he will then see the following menu, allowing him to either jump to the administrator account (by clicking on the menu item with the star)....

Because Robbert is allowed to become the administrator, he can even jump to any account managed by that administrator, by typing in the name of the required user (e.g., Senne Mennes in the example below).

That text-box will only appear when the target user is an administrator. If a regular user is allowed to jump to some other regular user, then that text-box will not appear.

Additional details to be aware of

• Users will notice a small delay when hovering over the Switch to linked account menu item. The reason is that all the different ClauseBuddy-servers will be asked whether this particular user happens to be allowed to one of "their" users.

• Because this is too complex and fragile to set up, it is not currently possible in the administration interface to add a jump from a user-account of one customer to a user- account of another customer. If you require this kind of jump, then please contact the ClauseBase-team, which will then take care of this for you.

• When SSO is not enabled for the target customer, the linked account will expire after 4 hours. If SSO is enabled at the target customer, the SSO-expiry configured for the target customer will instead be used.