By integrating with your Active Directory infrastructure, VSys Live is the perfect tool for providing a volunteering portal for your employees.
These instructions assume that:
You have an existing Active Directory infrastructure that your staff can log into.
Your employees will access VSys Live using your intranet (inwardly-facing).
Before any aspect of VSys Live can be installed, VSys One must be installed and connected to its underlying SQL Server database.
Basic Setup
A base VSys Live installation is provided by the Bespoke implementation team. This installation includes Apache, Thin and VOXI, as well as initial configuration for these elements. After installation, this will need to be configured:
Connect VOXI to your VSys One database.
Update Apache to listen on the appropriate local ports, and to forward requests to Thin.
Update Thin to connect to the local VOXI instance.
Configure Windows Firewall to block outside access to VOXI.
Enable Security
In order to allow your staff to log into VSys Live using their AD account, you'll need to enable VSys Security and configure it to use your domain for authentication.
A job lookup block visible to both logged-in and anonymous visitors.
Login and logout blocks.
Define a "My info" page, and include on that page at least:
A listings block for volunteer hours details and summaries.
A listings block for upcoming assignments.
VSys Live General Setup
Under General settings for the default site:
On the VSys Live settings panel, define your graphic, URL, site name, pages and CSS/JavaScript settings.
On the Feature enabling panel, check the following:
Enable checkin
Enable hours entry
Enable job signup
Enable job cancellation
On the Login panel:
Check Allow domain authentication for volunteers. This allows your volunteers (staff) to log into VSys Live using the same credentials they do for your domain.
Check Automatically create new volunteers from Active Directory on first login. This tells VSys Live to, when an unrecognized user logs in, check Active Directory anyway, and if that person exists there, create him in VSys.
Check Automatically update existing volunteers' information from Active Directory on login. This tells VSys to, when a volunteer logs in, update that person's name, address, phones and other properties from AD into VSys One.
Optionally choose a VSys field into which the user's Department field from AD should be copied.
On the Hours entry panel:
Set any required statuses or other properties. (These may not be needed since an inactive employee could not authenticate against AD anyway.)
Choose to require or not the approval of self-entered hours.
Jobs Setup
If your employees will be selecting jobs/openings to volunteer for:
Define one or more job groups and jobs that your employees could choose from. (Remember that these are the job descriptions rather than the actual openings that employees would select.)
Create job openings for them to select from. You'll update these on a regular basis with new opportunities.
Hours Entry
Employees can log hours in multiple ways:
If those employees have assignments, they can check in and out of the assignments if the "Check in" block is included on any VSys Live page they have access to. Using this immediately posts hours to the employee's record.
Including the "Hours entry" block lets the employees manually select jobs, start date/times and durations. Using this immediately posts hours to the employee's record if self-entered hours do not require approval (see the Hours entry panel under General settings). If they do require approval, the hours must first be approved using the Approve/reject volunteer-entered hours tool.
