Person, organisation and access
Three things that look alike and are not the same. The difference decides what a user sees.
- Person
- An identity: name, email, status. Not phone, title or profile fields.
- Organisation
- A grouping of people who share the same data. Name, VAT id and email domain, where the last two are match keys.
- Access
- What you give: person, portal, organisation and persona in one row. Access is the thing that gets granted, changed and withdrawn.
Why the grain matters
The same person can have access to two portals through two different organisations. That is two accesses, they appear as two rows on the Users tab, and they can be withdrawn separately.
The link to the source system sits on the organisation, not on the person. That is why the most common reason for "the customer cannot see anything" is that the organisation has not been linked, or that the access has no organisation at all.
The two problems the list surfaces
- The organisation is missing a link to an app that finds data per organisation. Widgets from that app are empty for everyone in the organisation.
- An access with no organisation, in a portal where such an app is running. It looks like "no data" rather than a fault, which is exactly why it is called out explicitly.
An organisation comes into being because someone was granted access. There is no way to create one as a filing action, and the list is sorted by state rather than alphabetically.