Words we use
Most of these are ordinary words. A few mean something specific in Plugboard, and “person” and “user” are two different things here.
Tenant. One institution. A self-hosted install has one. A managed deployment has one per customer, and a multi-campus customer can have several. Every record belongs to a tenant and cannot be seen from another.
Person. A student, staff member or parent. People are synced in from your student information system and directory, not typed in. A person does not sign in to the console. They tap a card at the kiosk or sign in to a portal.
User. Somebody with a Plugboard account who signs in to the technician console, usually ICT staff. Users have roles; people do not.
Module. A feature that can be switched on or off for your institution, keyed
as module.something. Turning one off removes its navigation and stops its
endpoints answering. See modules.
Permission. A fine-grained right such as loan.issue or charge.approve.
Permissions are granted through roles. See
permissions.
Connectors
Section titled “Connectors”Connector. An integration definition: a category, an authentication kind, a configuration form, a secret form, and a list of capabilities. Jamf Pro is a connector.
Connector instance. A connector you have configured, with your URL and your credentials. You can have more than one instance of the same connector.
Capability. Something a connector can do, such as looking up a device by serial. A feature asks for the capability, and whichever connector you have enabled answers, which is what makes swapping an MDM a settings change. See capabilities.
Demo mode. A per-connector switch that makes it return realistic fictional data instead of calling the real system. Use it before credentials arrive, and turn it off afterwards.
Connector agent. A small program installed inside your network so a managed deployment can reach systems that are not on the internet. It dials out; nothing dials in. See connector agents.
Submission. A repair. Somebody’s device needs work, and this is the record of it: the device, the problem, the person, the status and the cost.
Ticket. Work that is not a device repair. A fault, a request, a question. Tickets have categories, queues and canned responses; submissions have devices and repair types. They are separate modules and either can be switched off.
Repair type. What kind of repair it is, defined by you. Each carries a coverage.
Coverage. Who pays: warranty, insurance, or chargeable. It appears when the person lodges, and it is how cost analytics splits spending.
Loan. A spare device lent to somebody, usually while theirs is being repaired. Loans have numbers, live in groups, and can be pulled automatically from an MDM smart group.
Loan group. A pool of loan devices with its own kind and numbering, such as Loan Laptops or Staff Loaners.
Charge. What a family is being asked to pay for a repair. One person raises it and a second approves it. See damage charges.
Induction. A bulk device handout, usually at the start of a year. A roster is imported, students are tracked through it, and each one’s issued device is recorded.
Stocktake. A physical audit. Work through a location scanning serials to see what is there.
Service quality
Section titled “Service quality”SLA. Response and resolution targets per priority. Breaching one flags the submission and raises an alert. See service levels.
CSAT. The one to five star rating a person can leave on the tracking page after their repair closes. See satisfaction ratings.
Monitor. A scheduled check on a service you care about: an HTTP endpoint, a TCP port, a TLS certificate expiry, a ping, or the heartbeat of a connector agent. See monitors.
Automation rule. A when-then rule evaluated when a submission is created. Conditions match on type, priority or coverage; actions set a priority, assign a technician, or notify. See automation rules.
Deployment
Section titled “Deployment”Deployment. One running instance of Plugboard. Has an id, a region, a version and a release channel. The unit that gets updated, backed up and billed.
Channel. stable or beta. Beta gets new versions earlier. The channel does
not cause an update on its own.
Licence. A signed token stating your plan and limits. Your instance checks it locally and offline, so a network outage does not disable the desk.
Telemetry. Count-only usage a deployment reports: how many technician accounts, how many managed devices, which modules are on, what version. No names, no records, no content.
Security
Section titled “Security”Secrets vault. Where connector credentials live. They are encrypted before they reach the database and decrypted in memory only for the duration of a call.
SECRETS_MASTER_KEY. The key that encrypts the vault and your backups. A
database restored without it cannot decrypt its own secrets. Keep a copy
somewhere other than the server.
Audit log. A record of covered operations, with configurable retention and no application interface to edit individual entries. Coverage is not complete. See the audit log.