Freshservice allows you to change the license type of an IT agent to a business agent to leverage the purpose-built product capabilities for business teams. However, it is important to understand how the agent being converted will be impacted, as well as the recommended process to do the same. This article helps with both these aspects. 



NOTE: As a pre-requisite to change an IT agent to a business agent, you would need to buy a business agent license. Here is an article to understand the process of buying a business agent license.



TABLE OF CONTENTS


Impact of changing an IT agent to a business agent


As compared to IT agents, business agents get access to fewer functionalities. Once you convert an IT agent to a business agent, the agent's access to data and settings will be impacted as follows.

 

Impact on access to data in IT workspaces

  • Business agents have limited access to data in IT workspaces.     
    • They can continue to view the following:
      • Tickets. They can also add private notes to them.
      • Solution articles
      • Ticket/Task/Knowledge Base reports
    • They cannot do the following in IT workspaces: 
      • Own tickets or edit them
      • Own tasks assigned to IT workspaces
      • Owns tasks added to problems, changes and releases
      • Create or edit solution articles
      • Create or edit reports
      • Administer the workspace


Restriction on access to product capabilities

They will be unable to access the following product capabilities as business agents. 

  • Problems

  • Changes

  • Releases

  • Alerts

  • Services

  • Assets

  • Contracts

  • Purchase Orders

  • On-call Management

  • Workload Management

  • Software Projects

    • Business agents can only work on business projects and not software projects. If these agents are a member of a software project, they will be removed from the project. However, they will still be able to view these projects if they are public. 

Here is an article that highlights the exhaustive set of functionalities available for business agents.



Ways to update the license of an agent from 'IT' to 'Business'

Freshservice allows you three ways to make this update:

  • By updating the 'license type' field in the agent's profile 

  • While importing agents, the license type can be specified to be business

  • Via Agent Update API  [license_type = business]


The recommended method to update an agent from IT to Business license


If agents on the IT license are converted to business agents directly, their access to work on incidents and service requests will be immediately revoked if they are actively working in any IT workspace. To prevent this, the license type update needs to be carefully planned so that your service desk operations are not affected.


The recommended process is:

  • Create a new business workspace (in case you do not have any business workspace already) 

  • Set up the configurations such that this workspace can start receiving tickets. 

  • Publish the workspace

  • Move the existing tickets of the corresponding agents to the business workspace. Please read this article to understand the process and impact of moving tickets from one workspace to another. 

  • The agents can now be converted by going to the agent profile and changing the license type to ‘Business' 

  • Grant the required role to the business agent in the newly created business workspace 


Please reach out to support@freshservice.com for queries if any.


Updating the license from 'Business' to 'IT'


An agent's license can be changed to IT from Business anytime. The agent will not lose access to any data or admin settings and can be additionally granted access to other advanced capabilities.