TruVoice offers the ability to provision and deprovision users automatically via API using the SCIM protocol. This enables clients to take a hands-off approach to managing their TruVoice users by developing an integration with other identity systems, such as an HR/HCM platform, and leveraging the TruVoice SCIM APIs to sync a given employee's details with their TruVoice account. 

This article covers the what, why, and how of this integration capability.

• What is a SCIM API?
• Why should I consider using the SCIM API?
• Key use cases
• How do I get started with the SCIM API?

What is a SCIM API?

SCIM stands for System for Cross-domain Identity Management, which provides a standard mechanism for managing the identities of users across different systems. Essentially, it lets you keep a given user's details synchronized between the two systems so that, when details are changed, those changes can be applied to the other system automatically. 

Important: For TruVoice's purposes, this is a one-way sync, meaning that the integration only updates a user's details in TruVoice. If an admin manually makes a change to a user's details in TruVoice, that change does NOT get pushed back into the other system. In other words, the other system remains the single source of truth.

Why should I consider using the SCIM API?

In today's business landscape, change happens frequently - especially in larger organizations. If you have hundreds or thousands of employees, all or most of whom should have access to TruVoice to leverage the invaluable insights provided by your customers' feedback, managing their TruVoice accounts can become quite exhausting when you frequently have new employees being onboarded, existing employees being terminated, or other existing employees changing teams. In fact, this daunting task is frequently cited as a reason for not granting organization-wide access to the TruVoice platform.

With the SCIM API, you can build an integration between your main identity system and TruVoice to manage those changes automatically so that an administrator doesn't have to spend countless hours doing it. When a new employee is onboarded, as soon as their profile is created in the main system, the API can be called to create their TruVoice account. When an employee is terminated, the API can automatically disable their TruVoice account. When an employee's details are changed, the API can send those updated details to TruVoice to modify permissions or data restrictions accordingly, if necessary.

Key use cases

TruVoice provides several data aggregations that key off the concept of a "Sales Team", as well as several data restriction mechanisms to ensure that users can only view and interact with relevant data (ie. GDPR limitations). When it comes to managing which users are on which managers' Team, it can be quite a daunting task when your sales org has several hundreds, if not thousands, of employees with varying data requirements, team hierarchies, and a propensity for changing rapidly. 

With the SCIM API, this becomes an effortless task. The SCIM API can be set up to keep a user's TruVoice details in sync with the main identity system so that, as soon as an employee's role changes, or they get assigned to a different manager, or move to a different region, their TruVoice account is updated accordingly. If the relevant TruVoice settings and permission groups are configured correctly, you can rest assured that employees will always have the access that is relevant to their current position, even new employees that are onboarded, without having to manage their TruVoice accounts directly. 

How do I get started with the SCIM API?

Leveraging the SCIM API has a greater up-front lift to get set up and may not be worth the effort for a smaller organization; however, for a larger organization, the up-front time and effort required is well worth the time savings an administrator gains by not having to directly manage everyone's TruVoice account. 

The time and effort required can vary greatly from one organization to the next, depending on several factors, such as whether or not your specific identity system supports integrating to another system via the SCIM protocol, as well as how complex you want or need to get with it, the amount of dev resources that can be committed to the project, and the skill level of those resources.

The outline of operations is:

1. Ensure TruVoice is configured correctly 
   1. User related settings can be changed at any time, but having them configured to your needs prior to beginning the integration will make it easier to test the integration and ensure SCIM-managed users inherit those settings correctly.
   2. User permission groups should be configured ahead of time so that the integration can be coded correctly to reference those groups where applicable. This can be ignored if your only goal for the integration is to have user accounts created or disabled automatically and plan to manage access permissions manually.
2. Coordinate with dev resources to scope the project
   1. Dev resources can be your own in-house dev team, or a third-party integrator. TruVoice only provides the SCIM API; we do not handle the actual development of the integration with your identity system.
   2. The dev(s) doing the work need to be informed of the goal of the integration and scope of what it should do. They will also need to review the API documentation to get familiar with the API schema to begin planning how to connect different actions.
   3. The scope is entirely up to you. It can be as simple as just having the integration create a TruVoice account when a new employee is onboarded and disable an employee upon termination, or it can handle all aspects of the user account from name changes, to role changes, to manager changes, combined with automatically adding or removing them from user permission groups based on certain conditions.
3. Begin development
   1. Your TruVoice CSM will need to provide you with your client identifier and API key for development to begin. If this has not already been provided by this point, reach out to your CSM to obtain it.
   2. The dev resources should have everything they need between the documentation linked above and the project scoping session to get started. If they have any technical questions, feel free to coordinate with your CSM to hold a meeting between the devs and the TruVoice Product Team, or have them reach out to us by sending an email to support@truvoice.io 
4. Test the integration
   1. When development is complete and ready to test, coordinate with your CSM to connect the dev team and TruVoice Product Team to test and ensure everything is working as expected before going live with the integration.
5. Go live
   1. Once everything is tested and determined to be working as expected, you're ready to go live with the integration and can sit back and enjoy no longer having to manually manage TruVoice user accounts.