Associate Departments in the FedRAMP® Environment

In the FedRAMP® environment, associations between departments and customers are made by the customer admin.  They may enable the discovery button and then tailor their departments to facilitate discoverability by customer admins from other organizations.  Departments that request an association are called "local" or "source" departments, and they seek an association with "target" departments. 

Enable Discovery 

The "Disable Discovery" button shows that the customer is set to Enable Discovery.  

Select Department for Discovery

Click on the departments tab and highlight a department or departments by checking the box.  Select "Enable Discovery."

See the confirmation message that the department is now discoverable to others. 

Now click on the Association Requests tab and select "Add."

A list of available, discoverable departments will pop up for selection. Use the search box as shown to narrow the list and refine your search.  Type in the department name exactly into the search box.

Click on the box to highlight the intended department. Click "Next."

Confirm the local department that is seeking the association. Click "Next"

Fill in the information for the Association Request.  These settings are ironclad in the request and cannot be modified.  If the settings change, the association must be deleted and then begun again.  The next settings determine whether the association is to be uni or bi-directional. 

Allow Target Users In: permits users from South 8 (request recipient, or target) as contacts to users in North 7 (requester, or source) and as group members to groups in North 7. 

Allow Source Users Out: permits the other customer to add users in North 7 as contacts to users in South 8 and as group members to their groups in South 8.

Please note:  these settings cannot be changed once the association has been made.  If the parameters need to be changed, the association needs to be deleted and remade with the corrected settings. 

Once the this has been done, click Submit.

See the confirmation message that an association request has been submitted. 

An email message from the requester's customer name will be sent to the email address associated with the target department with the subject line "Inter-Department Association Request."  In this example, the email will come from ABC North. 

Receive an Association Request

From the association requests tab, the customer admin of the recipient agency (in this case, ABC South), may view that they have receive an association request. 

To respond to the request, select the department to bring up the action tabs.

See the confirmation window that the association response was sent.  An email will be sent back to the original requester saying that the request has been accepted or rejected.  The response message will come from the customer associated with the target department, in this case, ABC South. 

Once the association has been confirmed, the customer admin may now add the users from the associated departments to groups and contact lists.