Customer Accounts

Last updated: August 31, 2022

Managed workstation customer accounts (departments) provide a way to organize, manage, and track your organization’s use of our services.

MWS customer account basics

MWS customer accounts have the following properties:

  • Descriptive name
  • Short name
  • Eligibility group(s) for MWS services which reference the users your organization is authorizing
  • Two default budgets, one for user-related charges and one for computer-related charges
  • Key contact information for four defined roles:
    • Owner contact
    • Billing contact
    • Technical contact
    • Alternate technical contact
  • Relationship to all resources that Managed Workstation provides. These include:
    • All managed workstations for your organization
    • All Shared File Service directory paths (the “I drive”)
    • All home directories for your organization (the “H drive”)
    • All users enabled for MWS capabilities as denoted by eligibility group(s)
      • VPN access
      • Home directory access
      • Shared File Service access
      • Managed workstation access

Multiple MWS customer accounts

Your organization may want to have more than one MWS customer account in order to effectively organize/manage/track your use of MWS resources.

It is up to you how many MWS customer accounts you have. However, the following things should only be in one MWS customer accounts:

  • Users and corresponding user-only resources like home directory
  • Managed workstations
  • Shared File Service directory paths

Eligibility groups

Managed Workstation provides 4 general capabilities to users:

  • Managed Workstation access
  • Managed Workstation Home directory (H:\)
  • Managed Workstation VPN access
  • Managed Workstation File Service access (I:\groups)

Each Managed Workstation customer account is asked to provide at least one eligibility group to enable this set of user access. This eligibility group is a UW Groups Service group is an authoritative list of users you would like to have access to our services. Most customer accounts want all of their users to get all 4 of these capabilities, so only a single eligibility group is all that is needed. If this is the case for your organization, you can follow these simple instructions to change your eligibility group.

This means that when someone joins or leaves the organization you should add or remove them to your eligibility group via the Group Service. This will result in the desired Managed Workstation access change.

However, some customers like to differentiate which users get which capability. If that’s the case for your customer account, we’ll need as many eligibility groups as you need to differentiate.  To keep things simple for the majority of customers, we’ve limited your ability to set up these eligibility groups. So if you need to differentiate who gets a home directory or who can get access to your files in the Managed Workstation file services or who gets VPN access, you’ll need two or more eligibility groups. Email us for help in setting up multiple eligibility groups.

Default budgets

Each MWS customer account has two default budgets, one for user-related charges and one for computer-related charges. These budgets are only used when the MWS customer account does not provide an explicit budget for the relevant resource.

For example, on a per-user basis, we bill for the Managed Workstation home directory. Customer account contacts can explicitly assign a budget to a given home directory via MyIT. If no budget is explicitly provided, we assign the default user budget for your customer account to your new home directories.

Put another way, if you add a new user to your eligibility group and you do nothing further, then the default user budget will be used for that new user’s Managed Workstation home directory. If that isn’t the desired outcome, you can use MyIT to explicitly assign a different budget.

Customer account contacts

Each MWS customer account must have at least one contact in up to four defined roles:

  • Owner contact – this person is considered authoritative for all aspects of your customer account
  • Billing contact – this person has some budget responsibility within your organization and is authorized to view and request changes to billing information
  • Technical contact – this person has technical responsibility within your organization
  • Alternate technical contact – this person also has some technical responsibility within your organization

The Managed Workstation service has expectations of people assigned these roles. Collectively, the people filling these roles must:

  • Ensure that eligibility groups are updated to reflect the coming and goings of people within your organization
  • Budgets used for billable MWS services are correct
  • Contacts are up-to-date
  • Ensure notifications from the MWS service are communicated to your organization, when appropriate. NOTE: we recommend all contacts are on the mws-announce mailing list.
  • Represent your organization’s needs from the Managed Workstation service
  • Ensure that appropriate resolutions are taken when the Managed Workstation identifies problems specific to your organization’s use of Managed Workstation
  • Advise your organization about Managed Workstation capabilities available to them

Managed Workstation provides a variety of resources for MWS customer account contacts: Tools for contacts.

Requesting a MWS customer account (department)

There is a form to request a MWS customer account. Please review the information you’ll need to provide:

To set up new Managed Workstation department(s), you will need an eligibility group so please review the sections on Setting up an Eligibility Group.

You will also establish two default budgets per dept:

  • Workstations
  • Users (consulting; H: and I: drive storage)

Using myIT, you can change the budget for any workstation or file directory, but we require default budgets on file.