Different Domains, Different Products, Same Staff

[EVO_Matt]

Hey everyone, first off just wanted to say I'm extremely impressed with V3.
As a previous user of PD and v2 it's by far the best solution I've found.

However I'm having a bit of trouble understanding how to accomplish something.

I've got a set of staff who handles 2 or 3 companies I own, all with different domains and different products, however all under the same corporate umbrella.

I'm wondering if it's possible to have the following.

http://support.companyA.com
http://support.companyB.com
http://support.companyC.com

All with the same livehelp system and same database so my guys can all use the winapp without three browser windows open, or three copies of winapp, as I'm sure you can see how difficult that would be for them

I did something like this with my other livehelp software, but am not sure if or how to accomplish it with Kayako. I've tried symlinking the /support folder to the supportsuite install, however that's a no go. And yes, I have the additional domain licenses, knew I'd need those.

I'm not asking about email piping, as we're using pop3 simply because no matter what I tried on our cpanel box, I just couldn't get the piping to work. And yes, I must have tried about two dozen different things, all stemming from the forum posts here, so if someone wants to help me with that in PM's or something I'd be eternally greatful. Anyway before I got off on that tangent lol, so yea, not about the email piping, but regarding the different domains.

Thanks in advance, and if you didn't get any of that above, please let me know, I'll try to fix it so you can read it

Matt

[Neil-UKWSD]

Hi,

You can set which departments show per template group, so would just need to make sure you set the departments you want to show per template group.

Then just assign your staff to the relevant departments.

Your support guys when in the WinApp would see the visitors from all 3 support sites.

[EVO_Matt]

Originally Posted by Neil-UKWSD

Hi,

You can set which departments show per template group, so would just need to make sure you set the departments you want to show per template group.

Then just assign your staff to the relevant departments.

Your support guys when in the WinApp would see the visitors from all 3 support sites.

I know that I can do it with different template groups, however I want to have each company name have their own support.company.com. Is this even possible or am I going to have to forward the other two companies to a http://support.companyA.com/?group=templateB?

This is my problem, even though the companies are filed under the same corporate identiy, they have nothing to do with each other, which is why I don't want a person browsing http://www.companyB.com to click on support or live help and be directed to http://www.companyA.com/?group=templateB.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Matt

[netFusion]

Originally Posted by EVO_Matt

This is my problem, even though the companies are filed under the same corporate identiy, they have nothing to do with each other, which is why I don't want a person browsing http://www.companyB.com to click on support or live help and be directed to http://www.companyA.com/?group=templateB.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Matt

Hmmm, you could register a generic domain name that has nothing to do with any of the companyA, companyB, or companyC names or the Corporate Identity that applies to all of them collectively.

Then keep the web interface generic and personalize the company name content in the template groups, making a template group for each different department that applies to each company unit.

The mail parser can pick up from different domain names, so you could still have support@companyA.com, sales@companyB.com, marketing@companyC.com, etc. that would all tie into the "GenericSupportServices.com" domain name that the eSupport/SupportSuite web interface uses.

However, in the web interface, the end user would still have to select the appropriate department (companyA, companyB, or companyC) from the GenericSupportServices.com web page to be routed the appropriate company's templated area... You might be able to work around this by including the appropriate template groups in the links from a separate web page or from the individual companyA, companyB, or companyC web pages. Haven't tried that, so I don't know how well it would work out...

Food for thought... Good luck!

[mmay]

Originally Posted by EVO_Matt

I know that I can do it with different template groups, however I want to have each company name have their own support.company.com. Is this even possible or am I going to have to forward the other two companies to a http://support.companyA.com/?group=templateB?

This is my problem, even though the companies are filed under the same corporate identiy, they have nothing to do with each other, which is why I don't want a person browsing http://www.companyB.com to click on support or live help and be directed to http://www.companyA.com/?group=templateB.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Matt

You can have as many URL's you want work with the product, but you do need to pay for the extra ones, add-on domains are $49.95 and you can get them through the Members site.

Now, it's up to you to get the URLs to all map to the same server tho, but that is not hard either... Just either have both URL's map to the same external IP, or have a firewall NAT the 2 different external IPs to the same internal IP.

[Vagrant X]

We're doing the same thing, serving two company support sites with some staff working on both. It's a pretty straight forward setup with 1 additional domain, templated groups for the different companies keep it distinctly separate, and departments associated in the same way to keep all support queues/staff actions restricted to that company's stuff. We've also added a one-liner to index.php to direct the user to the right template group based on the host header for the additional domain, and that works great. It also avoids the cookie-set caching issue of isolated departments/groups on the same host name.

The problem we have now is that when a user posts a form or follows certain links, the product URL points them back to our primary company web address (this occurs throughout the HTML source output of course, but image refs and the like are less of a concern). This changes the group back to default (because the group variable in cookie isn't shared with the other domain, which we like).

I'm more than happy to modify this product URL setting based on group, on a per-request basis, but can't find the right file to insert the snippet - presumably after reading the settings from DB, but before any strings are concacenated/templates are processed. We currently have the yearly leased, so until we move to the owned version everything is encypted (otherwise I'd work it out myself ) - any pointers appreciated!

Chris

[kushaaal]

@vagrant X
How did you do that? can you explain a bit more!

[bubble]

i think you just set up domain alias to the same virtual host in your server and this should be working...and then, use some sort of default.php as the default page, which identifies the header domain and redirects to appropriate template

I tried this too but i too have the same problem as Vagrant X, which means the product is hardcoding a domain everywhere

So, i finally gave up

[Vagrant X]

That's pretty much it, yep, but I don't like redirects, so the $_GET['group'] variable is set to the right template group and then it's a simple case of include('index.php');

The variable that's being referenced is the Product URL defined in general settings, I believe. It seems to be used to construct absolute URLs for image refs and form actions. Which is fair enough, otherwise it's too open to license abuse

I haven't found a solution to keep the host header the same, and it's not a supported configuration, so until we move to an owned license and I've got a good chunk of free time (ha! ) I won't be coming with anything new on this front. It is perfectly fine if you don't need to cloak the 'primary' domain though - the only disadvantage I've seen being that after submitting a ticket, the user returns the default group on the primary domain (the group cookie isn't retained because of the host changing). If you've got links to different groups in a menu, for example, this behaviour could be acceptable or even preferred.

HTH
Chris

PS: kushaaal - I've got a post on another thread with a snippet example of what's in my default.php, if you want to give it a go. You might want to change to select the group on different criteria, but it should give you a starting point.