Thank you everyone for the great feedback and interest in our external users registration app.  I had hoped that people would find it useful and I think we have a way of distributing it at no cost to anyone interested.

The app is a single Domino database which has two versions depending on whether you want users to be able to register themselves or be invited to register by your internal users.  I’ve tried to show both below

The Notes menu is very simple because it’s not intended to be used by anyone other than the occasional administrator.  Everything else is done via a web interface

The Notes client menu

First you need to set up the configuration telling the app where the Directory that will contain external user names is.  This the directory that TDI will reference when creating policies but user accounts aren’t copied into it until the registration process is entirely complete.

This setup is for the internal registration app

This is the registration page for the public registration where anyone can sign up for access. Obviously you could modify this to have further checks in place but bear in mind Connections only allows access for external users to Communities they are invited into so if I did register myself and login, I wouldn’t be able to see or do anything without a further invite.

We ask for an email address and confirm the registration back to that address asking the external user to click a link to activate – that way we ensure the email addresses are valid and monitored.  The code also checks that no one else has registered with the address already

An external user would then receive an email with an activation link to click on

The registration page used for the internal invite model is slightly different but still checks the email address being registered is not already being used.

Then generates a unique registration code that can be emailed out to the external user manually (or automated if you want to add that code)

In each case the activation screen resulting from clicking on the link is the same. The password requirements can be modified by changing the code.

 And finally when the external user creates a valid password they get the following screen

So how do you get hold of a version of the app?  Obviously this is only part of the external user registration process which also includes LDAP and TDI configuration.  I would be very happy to quote on helping you with those pieces too but it’s not a requirement you use my consultancy to get access to the app, we are happy to make it available. I believe the setup can be completed in 2 – 3 hrs at most and again I’m happy to bill you to do that if you need me to or you can ask another Business Partner. You are welcome to take the app and support it yourself but in all cases our copyright remains in place (and is everywhere 🙂

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Please email Mike Smith (mikes @ turtlepartnership.com) or myself if you need more information or a copy of either the public registration or internal registration app. Bear with us and we’ll get it out to you as soon as we can.

Ever since Connections 5 gave us the ability to add external users to Communities it has been the number one requested feature from customers. The problem is that external users must exist in a LDAP source and also must have a profile in Connections that is created via TDI.

There are lots of ways to do this but few that are end user friendly and simple.  For that reason, some time ago we started to use our own XPages application that we make available to customers that automates the onboarding of external users into Connections.  The application is very simple and has two possible modes you can run in

1. User self registration.  An external user can go to your website and create their own name / pw and email address. The system then sends an email to confirm the address is valid and asks them to click to activate.  On activation they create their own password that is checked against password requirements in the app (such as length, upper case, special character etc).  Once created the user can also self service a password reset via an email request sent to their account.
2. User invite.  In this mode external users cannot create their own accounts but are instead invited by someone inside the company who again – goes to a webpage, creates a request and emails an activation link to their contact.  The rest of the process, activation, password checking, password reset remains the same.

It’s a single Domino database and can be set up in only a couple of hours.  Of course you still have to create the TDI sync but that’s a requirement no matter what you do.  For some time we’ve been considering how to make this tool available to the community at large since every customer we work with struggles with the same issue and we now have several good iterations of it we could share. We aren’t a product company and don’t want to sell it but we also can’t afford to commit to free support for a free download.

I’m not entirely sure of the answer. So far it’s been a non-issue since I’ve given it to customers we already do consultancy for or who ask us for consultancy. We’ve only charged for custom changes if required.  If you’d be interested in a copy of the database, seeing or testing it let me know and we’ll work something out.  It’s not open source, the code is our copyright but If you have any suggestions as to how we can make it more available without committing a lot of resource to productise it (which I would have to do for OpenNTF) I’d be very happy to hear them.