Become a Bomgar™ Jedi: Tips from the Master

Joel Bomgar, Founder, CEO and Jedi Master:
So, let's move on from there. Let's talk about ... one of the things that is new in our new version 9.1 is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. We actually support LDAP. And LDAP is a means of authenticating a username and password against a third party database. In most people's cases they're using Windows servers with Active Directory; Active Directory being the domain that stores all the user accounts and passwords. What you can do with Bomgar™, if you don't already have this set up, is you can actually point the Bomgar Box™ to the Active Directory domain controller and tell it that anytime a support rep is logging in, to authenticate their username and password against that database. The huge advantage with this is obviously you only have to maintain one set of usernames and passwords.

Now, this really isn't an issue if you have say five, six support reps. But, if you're dealing with maybe 200 tech support reps obviously it's a huge advantage to tie those usernames and passwords together and, unique to Bomgar™, this functionality is actually possible because the Bomgar Box™ is residing at your location so it actually senses, physically on your location it has the capabilities to run authentication requests against Active Directory or whatever that may be. So, a lot of great things you can do with that if you want to use your existing usernames and passwords that everybody already uses for email, and logging onto the network, and everything like that. If they want to use those as their preferred method of username and password for logging into Bomgar™, you can set that up. It's called LDAP; again Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. It's just an interface that allows you to do that.

We also do allow you to set up group policies, so if you have perhaps maybe an Active Directory you have a group set up that, everybody who's allowed to use Bomgar™ is in that group, if you have 200 people in that group you can also apply policies to those users. There's an interface on Bomgar™ to do that as well so it's a great way of assigning the same user-level rights to a whole lot of users at one time because, obviously, you don't want to granularly do that on a user-by-user basis. So, some great stuff you can do as far as tying Bomgar™ in with LDAP as well as setting up policies.