Tenant And Organization

The tenant is the single record that holds your organization's identity in BareBones Ticketing: its name, branding, support contact, and a set of display and disclosure settings that apply across the installation. This page covers creating that record and changing it.

One active tenant per installation

A tenant is the organization the installation belongs to. An installation has one active tenant and no more. TenantService refuses to create a second one while an active tenant exists: the create is rejected with An active tenant already exists.

The Create tenant button appears only when no tenant exists yet. Once one does, Tenant Administration offers editing only.

A tenant record cannot be retired or replaced in 1.0. There is no delete and no deactivate — the first tenant an installation creates is permanent for the life of that database. If the organization is renamed, restructured, merged, or split, edit the existing tenant record to fit the new situation; the identity, branding, support guidance, and display settings are all editable. Only if editing genuinely cannot represent the situation is the supported answer a new installation with a fresh database.

Full tenant management — true multi-tenancy, and retiring or replacing a tenant — is not part of this product. The single-tenant, edit-in-place model above is the whole of what it supports.

There is no multitenancy in 1.0. One installation serves one organization. Separating two organizations means running two installations with separate databases.

The tenant is not a scoping boundary you can use for isolation inside one installation. Departments own routing, access, and ownership. See Departments and access and Roles and access.

Before you start

• You need SystemAdmin and a satisfied step-up. Tenant Administration is whole-page gated: it shows nothing until step-up succeeds. See Admin Settings and step-up.
• Have the organization name, portal title, support email address, and footer text agreed before you start. All four are required and the save is refused if any is blank.
• Have the logo and the two brand colours ready. Colours must be hex values such as #1D4ED8.

Do not put internal URLs, credentials, or personal contact details in the branding, support, or footer fields. They are shown to every requester.

What the tenant record holds

Tenant Administration presents the record as tabs. Each tab has its own edit button, and each opens a drawer holding only that tab's fields.

Organization identity

Organization name is the organization the installation belongs to. Portal title is the title shown to requesters in the portal. Both are required and each is limited to 255 characters.

Branding

Branding has three starting points, chosen under Choose a starting point: Use website pulls a likely logo and palette from a public site address you give, Upload logo takes a file, and a third path takes a Logo link directly. Nothing changes until you save.

Main color and Supporting color are required hex values. The logo background is Transparent, a soft frame, or a solid badge. Text colour is Auto, black, white, or a colour you pick; if you pick one, you must supply a valid hex value or the save is refused.

Support guidance

Support email and Footer guidance are both required. They are display fields. Entering a support address does not create a support entitlement or a service-level agreement (SLA), and BareBones Ticketing does not send mail to that address on its own.

Date and time display

Date display standard chooses from eight regional presets or Custom, which enables the Custom date format field. A custom pattern can only be saved while Custom is selected. Display time zone chooses from the supported zone list and defaults to UTC.

These settings change how dates are drawn on screen. They do not change stored values, audit and export machine fields, or SLA arithmetic, all of which stay in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Ticket preferences

The tab opens with Requester intake, then the ticket reference fields.

Requester intake

Show Quick Ticket shortcuts to ordinary requesters decides whether requesters are offered Quick Ticket where the product would otherwise advertise it. It is on for a new tenant.

Clear it and My Tickets, the Service Catalog, and page-route search stop offering Quick Ticket. Nothing else changes: the Quick Ticket page itself stays reachable at its own address, the ticket-create service still accepts requests, and whatever a requester was already allowed to do, they are still allowed to do.

So this is a discovery setting, not a permission and not an on/off switch for the feature. Use it when you want requesters to start from the catalog, not to stop anyone raising a ticket. Who may reach Quick Ticket at all is decided elsewhere — Customer Portal requesters are refused it by their identity, whatever this setting says. See Customer portal.

Ticket references

Allocation scheme is either Department prefix, which produces references like IT-1, or Service category prefix, which uses each category's own prefix. Fallback prefix is used when category prefix mode is active and a ticket is created with no category prefix; it defaults to TICKET. It accepts letters and numbers only, is limited to 12 characters, and must begin with a letter. Whatever you type is stored in capitals.

Approval posture

Approval posture is Disabled, Defined, not yet configured, or Enforced. It governs a specific set of governed actions — enabling or disabling an external identity, certain workflow transitions, and ticket approval decisions — and each value changes what happens when someone attempts one:

The middle value is a deliberate safety state, not a soft one. Setting Approval posture to Defined, not yet configured and walking away leaves every governed action blocked — choose it only as a staging step on the way to Enforced, not as a resting position.

Two checkboxes sit alongside it. Enable external participant capability for this tenant controls whether external participant pages, invitations, external replies, file exchange, and linked-ticket search work at all; when it is off those surfaces are refused, and existing records stay visible to authorized internal readers. The toggle controls availability. It does not enrol anyone or grant access to a ticket. The second checkbox requires regulated approval for external identity disable and re-enable actions only, and widens nothing else.

Instruction mode

Instructional display mode decides how much optional orientation text BareBones Ticketing draws on non-admin workspaces — requester, agent, project, external, search, and preferences.

Guided is not a small amount of text. There are well over a hundred passages of optional guidance across the non-admin workspaces, and they cluster where people spend their time — a couple of dozen on the agent ticket workbench alone, and nearly as many on the service catalog. Turn it on deliberately, look at the screens your own people use most, and expect to turn it off again once they know their way around.

BareBones suppresses optional orientation copy only. It does not hide required warnings, validation messages, non-disclosure text, security requirements, workflow or audit information, refused-action text, or empty-state text. It changes nothing about who can do what.

A newly created tenant starts on BareBones. That default applies to new records only: it does not rewrite an existing tenant's stored choice, and a save that omits the field leaves the stored choice as it was.

If BareBones Ticketing reads a missing, invalid, or unavailable instruction mode value, it displays as Guided rather than suppressing text that might matter. That safe display does not mean the stored value was repaired — the product does not write a correction back. If you see Guided where you expect BareBones, open the Instruction mode tab and save a deliberate choice.

Comment-author disclosure

Requester portal comment authors decides how internal authors are named on comments a requester can already see.

This affects labelling only. It does not make any comment visible that was not already visible to the requester, and it does not change ticket access. Generated saml-* usernames are internal identifiers, not names to show people.

Create the tenant

Do this once, on a new installation.

1. Open Admin Settings and complete step-up.
2. Open Tenant Administration.
3. Select Create tenant. If the button is absent, a tenant already exists — edit it instead.
4. Complete Organization identity: Organization name and Portal title.
5. Complete Branding, Support guidance, Instruction mode, Date and time display, Ticket preferences, and Approval posture. The create drawer shows every section in one form.
6. Check the date Current preview against what you expect readers to see.
7. Select Create tenant once.
8. Confirm the overview now shows the saved values.

Change tenant settings

1. Open Admin Settings and complete step-up.
2. Open Tenant Administration and read the Overview tab.
3. Select the tab holding the setting you want, then its edit button — Edit tenant details, Edit branding, Edit support guidance, Edit instruction mode, Edit date and time display, Edit ticket references, or Edit approval posture.
4. Change the fields in the drawer. Use Cancel to leave without saving.
5. Select Save tenant changes once.
6. Re-open the tab and confirm the stored values are what you intended.

Each save records a TenantUpdated entry in the audit trail with the values before and after. Creating the record records TenantCreated.

If it does not work

• The save is refused for a missing value. Organization name, portal title, both colours, support email, and footer text are all required.
• A colour is refused. Use a hex value such as #1D4ED8. A picked text colour can only be saved while the picker choice is selected.
• The custom date format is refused. It can only be saved while Custom is the selected date display standard. Clear it before choosing a preset.
• Creating a tenant is refused because one already exists. Edit the existing record. Nothing in the product creates a second active tenant.
• The page is blank or asks you to verify. The step-up window expired. See Admin Settings and step-up.

Related pages

• Admin Settings and step-up
• Departments and access
• Roles and access
• Customer portal
• Limits and scope