Guests & Contractors

Your enterprise may occasionally need to augment staff with contractors for short term projects. More often, you need to provide controlled network access for guests or remote attendees of conferences. Guest manager meets these demands by providing you with a set of tools to create limited network accounts for Guests and Contractors that are secure, role-based and provide access for a specified time period. Guest manager allows you to:

• Control the point of access for guests and contractors.
• Manage guest and contractor authorization.
• Ensure that guests and contractors receive the appropriate network resources for the amount of time the services are needed.
• Provide IT staff with control and tracking capabilities.
• Provide administrators that allow non-IT staff to create accounts and manage accounts for visiting users.

You must have a license for the guest manager feature. You must be sure to have enough concurrent licenses to provide a connection to the network for each guest. When a host connects to the network it uses one concurrent license. The license is released as soon as that host disconnects from the network. See Licenses for additional information.

When guests or contractors enter their temporary user name, password, and other required information, guest manager checks the credentials against the guest or contractor account. Guest manager denies access if the credentials do not match the entries in the guest manager database or LDAP directory, depending on which is being used for guest or contractor authentication. In addition, guests and contractors can be scanned to ensure that they have up-to-date antivirus software and pose no threat to the network.