Help center › Set up
Inviting technicians and the password links
Roles
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, including deleting the organization. The person who signed up is the first owner; make a second one. |
| Admin | Settings, users, sites, categories, SLA policies, automations, imports, integrations, plus everything an agent can do. |
| Agent | Works tickets and devices: the inbox, assignments, replies, check-out, the knowledge base, reports, Ask Beacon. |
| Requester | Staff and students. They see the portal: their own requests, public articles, and the devices assigned to them. |
Owners, admins and agents are the people who work tickets; on District plans there is no limit on them, Starter allows three, and Pro counts them as seats. Requesters are never counted or billed on any plan.
Invite one person
Admin › Users › Invite user: name, email, role, and optionally a title, phone and site. Leave the temporary password empty and Send invitation email is on. The person gets a plain email with one link:
- The link opens a page that names your organization and shows their address partly masked, asks for a password of at least eight characters typed twice, activates the account and signs them in.
- It works for 7 days and once. The only copy of it is in the email; Beacon stores a hash, so nobody can read it back later, not even support.
- If it has expired or was already used, the page says so and offers Forgot password for the same organization.
- When single sign-on is on, the email also names the provider, so a technician can skip the password and sign in with the district account instead.
Until the person sets a password or signs in with single sign-on, their row shows Invited. The row menu (⋯) of anyone still invited has Resend invite: a fresh 7-day link, and the earlier one stops working. One person gets at most one invite email in ten minutes and five in a day; the button says “Try again later” past that.
Give a temporary password instead and turn Send invitation email off; then no email is sent and you tell them the password yourself.
Several people at once
- Admin › Users › Import CSV takes
email,name(or first and last name),role,titleandsite(matched by the site's name or code). A CSV upload never sends invitation emails: open each person and use Resend invite, or ask people to use Forgot password. (The API'sPOST /users/importalso acceptsphone,siteId,passwordandsendInvite.) - Admin › Import with the Users dataset is for whole rosters (Incident IQ exports, a spreadsheet of staff). It never sends invites: people arrive as Invited, which only means they have not signed in yet, and they sign in through single sign-on or ask for a password with Forgot password. Technicians keep the roles your file gives them; a file without a role column makes everyone a requester except people who already have a role. See Importing.
- With single sign-on and “Auto-create users” on, requesters need no import at all: they get an account the first time they sign in.
Under Admin › Settings › Email, Email people added by an import decides whether people who came from a file get Beacon email (ticket notifications, invites, password links). Turn it off to keep students and staff from your uploads out of email; they still see notifications in the app.
Forgot password
The sign-in page links to it. The answer is always “If that address has an account, an email is on its way”, and a 1-hour set-password link is sent only when the address has a password account or a pending invite in that organization. Nothing is sent for an unknown address, a disabled person, or an account that only signs in through single sign-on (there is no password to reset; use the provider). Setting the new password signs the person's other sessions out, as Change password does.
Changing roles, leaving, disabling
Edit the person to change the role. Prefer Disable over delete when someone leaves: their tickets and history stay attributed, and they can no longer sign in. Disabling also ends their sessions and any outstanding links.