Enabling Remote Portal Access in Discovery

Portal Access enables the end-user of a managed machine to remotely logon to that machine. Only one end-user of a machine can have Portal Access to that machine at a time. The end-user must have previously logged onto the machine locally at least once. Discovery supports both manual and automatic Portal Access assignment. For more information see:

• Managing Remote Portal Access

Automatic Portal Access Assignment

When a domain user logs on to a domain machine, both the domain machine and the domain user must be designated as Discovery portal candidates to enable the user to be automatically assigned as the Portal Access user of that machine.

Manual Portal Access Assignment

Discovery can also manually assign and remove Portal Access for domain users, regardless of whether the domain user or domain computer is a portal candidate or not.

Note: A domain user can be either a VSA user or a Portal Access user but not both. Once a VSA user logon has been created for a domain user, that user is no longer eligible to be a Portal Access user of any machine.

Portal Access Using Discovery

Discovery managed Portal Access provides the following unique behavior not available outside of Discovery.

• When a portal candidate user logs on to a portal candidate machine—and that portal candidate machine is not already assigned a Portal Access user—he or she is automatically assigned the Portal Access user of that machine.
• The Change Profile tab of Portal Access is automatically populated with the name, email and phone number of the currently logged in Portal Access candidate. The submitter fields of new Service Desk tickets are populated with the contact information stored in the Change Profile tab. This means Portal Access users don't have re-enter the same contact information, each time they create a new Service Desk ticket.

  Note: Regardless of the submitter information recorded in a ticket, the current Portal Access user sees all tickets related to that machine.

• If connection to the Active Directory server is lost, preventing domain authentication, users can still use their Portal Access logon to logon remotely to the Portal Access machine they were last assigned.
• All machines can be designated portal candidates using the Automatically assign portal access to portal candidates checkbox in the Computers Policy dialog on the OU/Containers tab.
• Any domain user who is not already a VSA user—whether a portal candidate or not—can be manually assigned the Portal Access user of a domain computer, using the Assign Portal User button on the Computers page.

  Note: The user can only be manually assigned the Portal Access user of a machine—using the Users & Portal Users page—if the user was the last user logged on to that machine. The list of eligible machines are listed in the Last Logged-onto Machines field in the lower panel of this same page.

• Any domain user—whether a portal candidate or not—can be manually removed as the Portal Access user of any domain computer at any time, using the Remove Portal User button on the Computers page.