Greetings!
This is Sue Bohn, Director of Program Management for Identity and Access Management. Have you ever joined a company and wished for an overview of your new department but couldn’t find a recent org chart? Or got an email from a colleague and wondered, “How does this person fit in the overall organization?” Updating org charts manually can be time-consuming. Our independent software vendor (ISV) partner, Pingboard, has a better solution! Its organization chart platform uses employee data to instantly create, update, and customize org charts.
In today’s Voice of the ISV blog, CTO Robert Eanes and his colleagues from Pingboard join us to describe how integrating the Pingboard platform with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) created a product that meets their customers need for security, provides a low maintenance solution, and generates business value.
Taking advantage of security, low maintenance and ease-of-use with Azure AD
We realized that customers have two main priorities from their software as a service (SaaS) and business productivity tools—data security and low maintenance. We think they also want the ability to evaluate a tool quickly to make a decision. When we demo our product, we use live customer data. Getting security clearances and assigning credentials are hurdles that customers prefer to avoid. That’s why integrating Pingboard with Azure AD with single sign-on (SSO) and user provisioning has been an advantage.
Supporting single sign-on
Single sign-on helps with security concerns about passwords that could compromise a customer’s system. Many companies are already using Azure AD as their directory source and have processes in place to update the type of information (e.g., name, job title, and reporting relationship) that Pingboard uses, so they wouldn’t have to do any extra maintenance to use our platform. And when we demonstrate Pingboard’s features to customers, they can see how quickly the org chart updates using their own data. It’s a convincing proposition.
SCIM for effortless user management
We implemented the System for Cross-Domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol for user provisioning to make it easy for organizations to manage access to Pingboard. We worked with SCIM because Microsoft and other companies are advocates of this open standard, and because we used it in the past and knew that it works like a charm. The implementation process was very smooth. The Azure AD team was also great at helping us and listening to feedback.
Pingboard finds success with Azure AD customers
I can’t emphasize how valuable automated user provisioning and SSO with Azure AD has been to us. It allows our sales team to offer a stronger and more compelling value proposition to customers who are also using Azure AD. We found that people who sign up for a free account to try out Pingboard are five times more likely to actually pay for Pingboard and use our platform on an on-going basis if they are using Azure AD or another solution that integrates with Azure AD.
From a sales perspective, you want to meet people where they are. When we looked at the market, Microsoft stood out. Any time a customer can use Pingboard with their system of record for employee data, it makes Pingboard a better product for them. They save because they don’t have to manually update their org charts. There’s virtually no maintenance once the integration is turned on. We found that customers are far less likely to leave Pingboard if they are integrated with Azure AD. That’s all extremely positive from our perspective. We see Microsoft customers as being our best customers!
Learn more
I hope you enjoyed reading about Pingboard’s integration story and will be able to apply some of their recommendations to your own integration plans. Read more about Pingboard’s integration experience here. You can expect more ISV partner stories ahead. In the meantime, check out the Azure Active Directory Identity Blog series to read more stories about Azure AD and identity management.
Learn how to integrate Pingboard for SSO with Azure AD here.
Follow a tutorial to enable automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of user accounts from Azure AD to Pingboard here.
Learn how to use the SCIM protocol to automatically provision users and groups from Azure Active Directory to applications here.
