Okta + Envoy Improve Visitor Registration Experience

Eric Crane:  Envoy's goal is to create universally welcoming experiences in the workplace. So the Envoy app is an iPad that you place at your front desk, and you can configure to have your visitors sign-in. You can take their picture, have them sign an NDA, as well as, notify their hosts that they've arrived at the office.

We chose to integrate with Okta to make it easier for our customers to maintain their employee information in Envoy, since that information can be used by visitors to select their hosts. We also have quite a few different overlapped customers who are constantly asking us for the integration, so we knew we needed to build it.

So, we view Okta as a great way for a lot of our customers to get on a similar standard. It makes it easy for us to manage the visitor experience while Okta takes care of the pieces involving the employee directory and identity management. The user lifecycle for Envoy users is pretty similar to the lifecycle of just an employee. When they join a company, Okta can help provision that employee into Envoy, it can associate that employee with certain roles in Envoy, if you'd like to have elevated permissions for things like inviting visitors, and then, when that person leaves the company, Okta can be used to deprovision those folks out of Envoy automatically.

The SCIM standard is a way to provision identities of, in Envoy's case, employees into the application pretty seamlessly. For us, it's a more secure solution than doing a two-way integration, because Envoy doesn't need to get permission or any type of information about the Okta directory itself, other than the information you choose to pass downstream to Envoy.

The Okta provisioning integration helps Envoy focus on things that are core to our product, visitor management, instead of needing to focus on things like, how do we get the directory up-to-date? How do we make sure it stays in sync? How do we make sure our customers host notifications are getting sent appropriately?

When we were working with Okta, they did a great job of making sure that we were aware of all the different pieces of their implementation of the SCIM standard. We really enjoyed working with Okta as a partner, they invited us onsite several times to talk through different pieces of our SCIM integration, and ultimately helped us deploy it at their own site, to be a Beta customer for all the rest of the Envoy customers.

So, we know when we approach a joint customer or prospect that's already using Okta, we have the right solution and tools for them. Envoy would certainly recommend implementing the SCIM standard for other integration partners with Okta.