Note: This article applies to VT Docs 4.4.3 and older

What are Sandboxes?

Sandboxes are logical areas where sets of users are set up. Users in a given sandbox can see all folders and files from any other users in that sandbox.

Many customers are happy with just one sandbox, but in cases where VT Docs is used in different areas or divisions of your organisation for example, then you will want to consider partitioning users into different sandboxes.

For instance it is common to see:

• legal users in their own sandbox
• and proposal or contracts users in a different sandbox

Sandboxes are powered from the one VT Docs deployment. Every VT Docs deployment always has one default sandbox. It's called "Default Sandbox"

How to Manage Sandboxes & Administer Users

There is a special tool for managing sandboxes. System administrators can manage both VisibleThread sandboxes and VisibleThread licenses from this tool.

Access the Administration site via a web browser (note: "sandboxAdmin" is case sensitive) at this url :

https://<VisibleThreadServer IP Address>/sandboxAdmin

In order to access the administration site, you will need a username and password. The default settings are as follows:

• username : "visiblethread"
• password: "password"

We recommend that you change these credentials to something more secure once you have completed the initial deployment of VisibleThread.

See this page for details on how to change these credentials: http://support.visiblethread.com/entries/23410842-Useful-configuration-settings

Here is what you see when you sign into the administration tool.

 

Adding users to a sandbox

The VisibleThread server contains a pre-configured 'Default Sandbox'. For typical deployments, all users in VisibleThread will exist within this sandbox.

 

Adding/Removing/Editing users in a Sandbox

To make changes to a particular user account,  or add or remove users to a sandbox, select the sandbox from the table and click on the "Add/Remove users" link.

For step by step instructions on managing the list of users in a particular sandbox, see https://support.visiblethread.com/hc/en-us/articles/214225366-How-do-I-add-remove-users-from-VisibleThread 

 

Creating a new sandbox

To create a new sandbox click on the 'Create sandbox':

   

A dialog similar to the one below will appear. Type in the name for the new sandbox and click 'Ok'.

 

To add users to the sandbox, follow the steps in the previous section.

 

Managing VisibleThread licenses 

In VisibleThread we license 'active' users. This means that a VisibleThread installation may have any number of users defined, but the number of users that can be 'active' at any time is restricted by the number of licenses purchased. Only 'active' users may log in to the VisibleThread application. A user can be activated or deactivated by selecting the sandbox in which they are defined, clicking the 'Add/Remove users' link, and modifying the user details. More detailed instructions can be found here https://support.visiblethread.com/hc/en-us/articles/214225366-How-do-I-add-remove-users-from-VisibleThread 

Viewing number of installed licenses

To view the number of licenses installed on the system, click the 'View License Information' button.

 

To upload additional licenses, click on the 'Upload additional license file' button

 

Allocating licenses to sandboxes

By default, all licenses installed on the system are shared across all sandboxes. Consider the following scenario:

• A VisbileThread Deployment with 10 licenses
• Two teams, Legal and Contracts. A sandbox is created for each team
• A member of the Legal team with admin rights can log in to VisibleThread and add 10 new users. This effectively locks out any user from Contracts as the license pool has been used up by the Legal team.

To avoid this scenario, you can centrally control the maximum number of licenses to allocate to a particular Sandbox. To do this select the sandbox and click 'Sandbox user Limit'

 

This presents you with a dialog allowing you to configure the maximum number of licenses that can be allocated to that sandbox. Note you can only allocate licenses up to the number of unused licenses on your system.

 

Once licenses have been allocated to a sandbox, they are effectively taken out of the central pool and not available for any other sandbox.