Nexmo is excited to announce that we have enhanced our account management features with a new capability that allows customers to manage their accounts with greater agility and flexibility. The account management permissions had previously centered around a primary account user who could add secondary users to the account with a subset of the primary user’s permissions. Now, the primary user can empower secondary users with equal authority, including the ability to fully manage other secondary users.
With secondary users being empowered to manage other secondary users, larger organizations can easily scale their account operations via the Nexmo Dashboard.
Manage accounts according to your organizational style
Having the primary user as the only individual on a team who can view or manage other secondary users reflects a command and control approach to management. In recent years, many organizations have steered away from command and control’s authoritative, top-down nature for the flat organizational style of an empowered workforce.
Nexmo customers can now choose the approach that best aligns with their organizational style. Teams that have flexible roles and agile methodologies can empower trusted members to broadly share the highest account management permissions. Teams who prefer the command and control philosophy can entrust account management authority to a single primary account manager and delegate limited permissions to secondary users.
For our part, we are moving towards role-based permissions to further serve our enterprise customers and this new Nexmo Dashboard capability reflects that wider effort. The Nexmo Dashboard has been a user-based permissions system, where the authority to take certain actions on an account has been granted at the individual level. While this approach does allow granular control of the account, it can also incur increased management overhead.
Role-based permissions adds a layer of categorization on top of the user-based access. Users can be assigned to groups that are in turn assigned particular permissions, a very efficient method of permissions management for large organizations.
How to enable the secondary user permission
By default, all Nexmo account users have the ability to:
- manage numbers
- make payments and view payment history
- search messages, calls or API requests
- create and manage applications
However, primary users also have the capability to view and manage secondary users, a permission they can now grant to secondary users by taking the following steps:
- Uncheck the “Unable to view and manage secondary users” checkbox on the Add user or Edit user pages.
- Confirm the change on the “Confirm user restrictions” dialog.
Some important notes to keep in mind when using this feature are:
- When the “Unable to view and manage secondary users” restriction is removed, all other restrictions for that user are also removed automatically. This setting gives the user equal capabilities to a primary user, including API key management.
- When the secondary user management restriction has been removed, other restrictions cannot be enabled.
- All existing secondary users will not have this restriction removed by default. The primary user will need to remove the restriction for every secondary user who needs the permissions granted.
Perhaps the user-based permissions model is the correct approach for a given Nexmo customer, those customers can choose to maintain the current model as is. But for those that choose a more decentralized, role-based approach, we’re proud to now offer that option.
We are excited to bring this new feature to market and we trust it will empower our users to deploy account management permissions in the way that is most effective for their businesses.
Developer
