Provider Portal Quick Start

Managed service providers (MSPs) and resellers often need a way to quickly create and easily administer Bitwarden organizations on behalf of business customers. Providers are administration entities that allow those businesses to create and manage client organizations through the Provider Portal.

The Provider Portal is an all-in-one management experience that enables Providers to manage customers’ Bitwarden organizations at scale. The Provider Portal streamlines administration tasks by centralizing a dedicated space to access and support each client, or to create a new one:

Contact us to sign up for the Provider program. After you register, a member of the Bitwarden team will contact you and issue an invitation to start a Provider:

Selecting the Setup Provider Now button will prompt you to log in to Bitwarden and fill out some Provider details:

As the creator of the Provider, you will be automatically given Provider admin status, allowing you to fully manage all aspects of the Provider and all client organizations. Bitwarden strongly recommends that you provision a second Provider admin for failover purposes.

Now, begin adding your employees as service users, which will allow them to fully administer all client organizations and create new ones or manage the Provider itself:

1. Invite Users. From the Provider Portal  Manage tab, invite users as service users (or invite additional Provider admins):

   

2. Instruct users to accept invites. Invited users will receive an email from Bitwarden inviting them to join the provider. Inform users that they should expect an invitation and that they will need to Log In with an existing Bitwarden account or Create Account to proceed:

   

3. Confirm accepted invitations. To complete the secure onboarding of your provider users, confirm accepted invitations from the Provider Portal  Manage tab:

   

With an assembled team of service users, you're ready to start setting up client organizations.

Client organizations are any organization that is attached to or administered by a Provider. To your customers, there's no difference between a "client" organization and a "regular" organization except for who is conducting administration.

Organizations relate Bitwarden users and vault items together for secure sharing of logins, cards, notes, and identities. Organizations have a unique vault, where Provider service users can manage the organization's items and collections, manage members and groups, run reporting, and configure organization settings:

Members of a client organization (your customer's end-users) will find shared items in their Vaults view alongside individually-owned items, as well as several methods for filtering the item list to only organization items or items in particular collections:

To create a new client organization, you must be a Provider Admin. Navigate to the  Clients tab of the Provider Portal and select the  New Client Organization button:

With your newly-created client organization, start building the perfect solution for your customer. Exact setup will be different for each client organization based on your customers' needs, but will typically involve:

1. Create collections. A good first step is to create a set of collections, which provide an organizing structure for the vault items you will add to the vault in the next step.

   Common collections patterns include Collections by Department (for example, users in the client's Marketing Team are assigned to a Marketing collection) or Collections by Function (for example, users from the client's Marketing Team are assigned to a Social Media collection):

   

2. Populate the organization vault. Once the structure of how you will store vault items is in place, you can begin populating the organization with your client's logins, notes, cards, and identities.

   Tipp

   You can create shared items from scratch, but we recommend importing a file that contains all their vault items.

3. Configure enterprise policies. Before beginning the user management portion of setup, configure enterprise policies in order to set rules-of-use for things such as master password complexity, use of two-step login, and admin password reset.

   Hinweis

   Enterprise policies are only available to Enterprise organizations.

4. Setup login with SSO. If your customer uses single sign-on (SSO) to authenticate with other applications, connect Bitwarden with their IdP to allow authentication with Bitwarden using end-users' SSO credentials.

5. Create user groups. For teams and enterprise organizations, create a set of groups for scalable permissions assignment. When you start adding users, add them to groups to have each user automatically inherit the group's configured permissions (for example, access to which collections).

   One common group-collection pattern is to create Groups by Department and Collections by Function, for example:

   

With the infrastructure for secure and scalable sharing of credentials in place, you can begin inviting users to the organization. Onboarding users to Bitwarden can be accomplished in three ways, depending on the size of your customer:

1. For smaller customers, you can send email invitations to users from the organization vault's  Members tab:

   

2. For larger customers who leverage an IdP such as Azure AD, Okta, OneLogin, or JumpCloud, use SCIM to automatically provision users.

3. For larger customers who leverage a directory service (Active Directory, LDAP, Okta, and more), use Directory Connector to sync organization users from the source directory and automatically issue invitations.

Regardless of whether you have invited users from the organization vault, using SCIM, or using Directory Connector, the same three-step process (Invite → Accept → Confirm) that you followed when onboarding provider users will apply here as well.