How Provisioning Improves Envoy’s Customer (and Visitor) Experience

We recently launched a program to help ISVs and developers build provisioning into their apps based on the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) standard. We wanted to hear from ISVs who see the benefit of adopting user management standards like SCIM, so we chatted with Eric Crane, a product manager at Envoy, about the value Envoy saw in provisioning, and how they benefited from Okta’s detailed documentation and developer support.

First off, tell us a little bit about Envoy.

Envoy is a visitor registration product that’s changing how visitors are greeted in workplaces around the world. Our mission is to have awesome visitor and host experiences become universal in the workplace. Businesses all around the world are getting rid of paper sign-in books and using Envoy to provide a seamless, iPad-based guest sign-in experience. We automate badge printing, host notifications and legal agreements — and with our Envoy Passport app, visitors can quickly auto-sign at any location using Envoy.

We’re backed by Andreessen Horowitz and have served 4 million visitors in 55 countries since being founded in 2013. We’re also used by some of today’s most exciting brands, including Box, Pinterest, Pandora, GoPro and Yelp. And Okta, of course.

And why are you implementing user provisioning?

As we continue to grow, we’ll further develop the set of features available to our users. We care deeply about our users being able to easily access our product and making it as easy as possible to work with Envoy — and we knew that many of them also use a provisioning tool like Okta, but we didn’t want those customers to have to maintain two separate lists of users. That’s why we worked with Okta to implement a seamless user provisioning integration, making it even simpler to get every single employee from Okta into Envoy.

Give us a customer use case for provisioning.

Currently, provisioning employee users to Envoy allows customers to set up and send host notifications to employees when guests arrive. We are also working on some cool new features that will enrich the employee experience in Envoy.

Any specific customer examples you can share?

One of our customers, Castlight Health, was using a manual CSV import, as well as manually adding or removing employees from the Envoy directory. This often took 15 (or more) minutes a week. With user provisioning, the entire process is automated and perfectly in sync. Previously, we could only pull from Okta’s directory every 24 hours.

Why did you choose to adopt SCIM for provisioning?

Using the SCIM standard helps Envoy scale. By relying on a consistent format for user data, we can be more certain about what information is available to Envoy. That helps us confidently build new features around the available data.

What was the process of working with Okta on SCIM?

We enjoyed working with Okta on SCIM. The process was very straightforward — I can break it down step-by-step:

1. Understand Okta’s implementation of SCIM and become more familiar with the standard.

2. Develop the basic framework for ingesting SCIM-style data.

3. Create a test application in Okta and use the new integration for ourselves.

4. Work with Okta to resolve any outstanding issues.

5. Identify customers who would benefit from the integration and work directly with them to implement a beta program.

6. Refine how the integration works further and (coming soon!) roll out to all of our customers using Okta for provisioning.

That’s awesome. Anything else you want to say about working with Okta?

Working with Okta means our customers have more choice for how they provision users. Any Envoy customer already using Okta can quickly get set-up — the experience is seamless. Our whole focus is to give our customers a better user experience because that means they tell more people about Envoy and we accelerate in the market.

Last but not least, what are the benefits of our product integration for our joint customers?

The benefits are great! For new customers who already have Okta, this means that it requires almost no work to set up the employee directory. Going forward, it’s also much less work to maintain the directory since everything syncs in real time.

If you’re interested in joining our SCIM provisioning developer programs, register here.