External Access Module

The External Access Module includes complementary features to manage external participation in Idea Central events. External participants, such as partners or suppliers, can be given access to the Idea Central environment with the same access levels as internal users. The External Access Module provides the functionality to register them as a separate user group, in order to handle legal issues and to track their activities separately.

This module is only available for hosted versions of Idea Central.

Main Features

Registration of externals: External participants are registered as a separate group of users which are marked as "external" in the system. The profile of an external participant, as well as the ideas that they create, include the name of the company that the person belongs to.

Legal waiver: The module includes a special waiver form that is used to manage the specific legal issues that need to be addressed with external participants. External contributors can be required to accept a special legal waiver before accessing the system.

Benefits

Controlling access rights for external participants: The module provides a straight-forward way for including external experts in Idea Central events, while making a distinction between different types of users where appropriate.
Companies can give their trusted suppliers and other partners full access to their Idea Central environment, while keeping the option to reserve certain Idea Central instances for internal participants only.
External and internal users can also be given different levels of reader rights to ideas and their thread within an event.

Management of legal issues: Intellectual property rights can create important liabilities when employees from other companies contribute valuable ideas. By explicitly managing the legal conditions for external participation, potential legal problems can be avoided.

Tracking of external participants: The contributions of external participants can be easily monitored.