How to register systems to multiple customers?

If you have an “ALMS Reseller” account, you can register and preconfigure devices to any ALMS account for which you know the ALMS account UID. There is no longer a requirement to have a formal Partnership with the account, although Sierra Wireless recommends that you work with your customers to ensure such partnerships are in place between your ALMS Reseller account and your customer’s account. For more info about account administration and Partners, see the Administration documentation.

The Register for multiple companies link on the Registration page allows you to upload a CSV containing settings for multiple devices, along with a TARGET_COMPANY field where you can specify customer accounts to which the devices will be registered. This can help streamline your workflows and register devices to multiple accounts all in one registration activity.

Please note that you can only register one model of device (e.g. AirLink MP70) at a time.

Before you begin

Registration to customer accounts does not require that your customers grant you permanent rights to register and configure devices directly within their account. However, Sierra Wireless recommends that you review these capabilities with your customers and have them decide what level of access to provide your users.

If they choose to provide you with permanent access to establish these register and configuration rights, the customer will need to assign your ALMS Reseller account a user profile with sufficient rights. For more information, see the Administration page . For a list of specific rights that should be included by your customer on the associated user profile please refer to the list below.

It is the customer’s responsibility to grant you access rights; therefore some coordination between you and your customers may be required. Customers that created their ALMS account by using your specific referral URL will have automatically granted you all the required rights. Those rights will be in place by default, unless the customer took explicit actions to modify their partnership profile with you. If your access has been restricted, the warnings described in the Import Dependencies section below will appear after you begin the registration process. If the customer account was created from the Sierra Wireless web site account creation link, the partnership may need to be manually created. Please ask an Administrator from the customer’s ALMS account to open a Support ticket with Sierra Wireless to create the partnership.

Please ensure that your partners have created a user profile that enabled the rights listed below on your profile:

• Entities > Settings > Create — enables you to clone templates
• Entities > Applications > Publish — enables you to share applications
• Entities > Systems > Create — enables you to create systems
• Entities > Systems > Activate — enables you to activate systems
• Account network > Partners > View and Account network > Profiles > View — enable you to view your rights

To register multiple systems to multiple customers from a file:

1. From the Register page, click Register for multiple companies.
2. From Register Operations to Customers, click Download template. For more information on how to fill out the csv file, see Customer Registration CSV file format below.

3. After completing and saving the template, click Select a CSV and upload your completed template.

   • The Specify reference firmware and Pre-configure Systems options do not apply when using a .csv file to register systems to multiple customers.

4. Click Import. The Import Dependencies window appears, showing you all the registration steps and the corresponding partner companies where the steps will take place. For more information, see Import Dependencies below.

Import Dependencies

The Import Dependencies window may include some “dependency setup” steps, which result from the preconfiguration steps that you specified. These steps may require templates and/or applications to be either available, published, or shared with each customer for the configuration step to work within their context.

This process requires that all of the system components you are using (templates, datasets, firmware, AAF applications) be initially available in your ALMS account before being published to your customer’s account(s).^* The Import Dependencies dialog provides a summary of the actions that will take place in each customer account. Review the list of operations that will take place and click Setup dependencies and continue when correct.

^* You may need to create and/or publish these components before starting.

• Create template: Re-creates the template that resides in your account in each of the customer accounts.
• Publish Application: Makes an application that was released ready to install. For more information on publishing applications, see the Application documentation.
• Reuse template: The wizard identified an equivalent template in the customer’s account that shares all the same settings. The customer’s template will be used in place of the template you specified.
• Share Application: Shares a private application with specific customers. This step does not appear if the application is public.

After you click Setup dependencies and continue, ALMS resolves the dependencies and proceeds with system registration.

Registration Operation for Customers without a Partnership

After proceeding with system registration, one Register Request operation is created for each target company. If the partnership between the ALMS Reseller account and the customer (TARGET_COMPANY) exists, the registration goes through directly.

If there is no Partnership, the operation remains in the “pending” state and the customer receives a notification that asks to accept the registration. After accepting, the devices are registered directly, and both the customer and Reseller are notified. If the customer rejects the Register Request, the register operation fails, and both customer and reseller are notified. Customers must accept or reject the request within 7 days, or the operation will time out.

Customers can select Auto-accept future requests to allow future registration requests from the Reseller to proceed without approval notifications. Selecting Auto-accept future requests along with accepting the Register Request establishes a restricted partnership with the ALMS Reseller account, in which the Reseller is only permitted to register devices into that company.

Missing Rights Error

An error message, such as the one in red text shown below, appears when the target customer has not granted you rights to create the system/template in their company.

If you see this warning, click Cancel (the Setup dependencies and continue button is unavailable). From there, you can either:

• Contact your customer to be granted the missing rights through the profile rights management page.
• Exclude customers, templates or application steps that caused dependency errors from your registration setup.

Customer Registration CSV file format

The file format is a .csv file (comma separated text file). Both comma ‘,’ and semi-colon ‘;’ are supported as separators.