The external communication with partners, customers and clients can be a relevant topic for an enterprise messaging app. Some examples are the collaboration with partners on a project, the follow-up discussion of a workshop with clients, the exchange of information with a patient, the scheduling of a meeting with a customer, etc.
While these use cases can improve the productivity, the external communication can also be a potential security leak of client data and intellectual property of the enterprise. Teamwire provides two different options for the external communication in order to balance productivity and security and meet different requirements.
1. Generally Allow (or Disallow) External Communication
For the cloud solution of our enterprise messaging app, there is a setting in the administrator portal of Teamwire to generally allow (or disallow) the external communication. If the external communication is enabled, all employees can communicate and collaborate with partners and clients, who also use Teamwire. The connection with customers and partners in this case normally happens via the address book of a user (this is done in a GDPR compliant way – fully pseudonymized and not storing any address book data).
This approach for the external communication is easy to setup and allows every employee to communicate externally, but it does not offer an enterprise a lot of control and transparency, what information exchange with outside users takes place. While Teamwire does provide a messaging archive to document all the internal and external communication, this is only a measure in hindsight. An enterprise needs to evaluate its data protection and security requirements to understand, if the general external communication is an option.
2. Secure Guest Access for External Users
Teamwire serves many enterprise customers in the more regulated industries (e.g. public sector, security forces, healthcare, financial services, energy, critical infrastructure) with very high security and data protection needs. These enterprises have to protect customer data and intellectual property at all times. That’s why it is important that the external access of partners and clients is fully secured and under central control of IT. For these requirements our enterprise messaging app provides a secure guest access for the cloud as well as for the on-premise solution.
For the secure guest access the IT hands out a special ID and password to an external user, which can be used to log in on any Teamwire app. Depending on the communication policies the IT has configured, the external user can collaborate with all employees of the enterprise or may only communicate with a selected group of internal users.
The secure guest access offers an enterprise always full transparency of all external users like partners and clients. In case the access is not required anymore or for security reasons, IT can block or remove the guest access of an external user at any time.
Summary
Employees can collaborate and communicate with outside partners and clients using the external communication option or the secure guest access feature of Teamwire. For more information about the external communication with our enterprise messaging app please contact us.
