How to Add & Delete Users from Total Connect

I di wires this is Frank at alarm grid we are back in our video lab working on our Total Connect tutorial videos and today we're going to show you how to add and delete users from the Total Connect website we'll start by surfing to Total Connect to calm and we'll just type that right in to our web browser here we're on Chrome today and we already have our username and password set up in your case if you don't have it Auto populated you can manually type in your username and password if you need any help getting into your Total Connect account you can reach out to your AlarmNet dealer if you have not set up an alarm net account check out our how to login video and you'll really you'll learn that you'll need to set up an alarm to account in advance assuming you have all your credentials we'll go ahead and log in once you get logged in to Total Connect we're going to jump over to the users section so on the left-hand side here we have users and if we expand this section you'll see a few different selections here now you may be wondering why you don't see these two on your login we do have multiple locations set up on on this login meaning that we have multiple alarm systems tied to the same login these this current location users and all location users will only show up if you do have multiple locations if you don't you can just ignore it if we go to add new user the first prompt will be whether or not you want this to be an admin standard or panel only user just to talk real quick about what these mean the admin is basically a Total Connect user that will also have admin access to add change or delete any existing users on Total Connect so if it's a business and you have a business partner office manager someone that you want to be able to manage this with you but you still want fallout you know it's kind of super admin access you can create them as an admin which will give them the ability to arm and disarm from Total Connect and also manage other users on the account the most common user type will be standard standard is basically just you know I want to add a user code to the system so they have local access and a Total Connect users so they can use the Total Connect interface to arm and disarm as well you can decide which which locations you want to give them access to and you can also choose whether or not they have access to automation or video and any individual items we'll show you that in detail in a moment the third user type here might be for a business situation may be a housecleaner or someone that you want to give local access to on the alarm system but do not need Total Connect access may be less tech-savvy alarm users that are going to be using the system might this might be a good thing for them by panel only it basically means that it'll push this code to the system they can arm and disarm locally at the panel but they will not have it in a username or password or login at all for Total Connect 2.0 so let's assume that we'll just do a standard user here this will launch us to the next screen and we'll be able to start typing things in so let's just go ahead and run a test here so we'll do Jane Doe at Jane Doe at gmail.com again this is where you could choose to change admin or standard user access later so you don't think necessarily decide that off the bat earlier up here you can add an image if you want this you know put a family photo or portrait of whoever this is time format you can choose a military time or just standard 12-hour time prompt for user code this is a selection which states right here it would why're you to enter your four-digit user if you want to keep things a bit more secure beyond just having to have the password for Total Connect this adds a second layer of security to be able to prompt this particular user not necessarily all users to have to type in manually their four-digit user code each time they arm and disarm from Total Connect I usually keep this disabled because I have all my users use touch ID through the app on the phone but you can certainly enable this if you want to keep things a bit more secure I'll go ahead and disable it for now we'll hit continue this will bump us to the next section here which will actually be the email or text alerts okay so there's there's three different types of alerts you can set up on a user email text and push notifications I will have videos for each of these and you can certainly check those out on our channel but just just to be clear here if I were to go back to this section where I typed in the email I was not entering the email as for alerts this is the username I generally recommend the email because I find it's the easiest thing to remember that way you have the email just as a universal login if you prefer to have a different username you can but just to differentiate from the email alerts which is the second section here known as contact information versus user information this will be if you want to receive email alerts in your inbox for whatever you enable under the notifications section here on the Left which which again will have a separate video for for today well we will set up the email alerts just so you can see how that works once we have the gmail account plugged in we can enter it here and confirm we'll get the check mark and it'll save let's say we wanted to add text alerts as well also known as SMS we can then enter the phone number here so we'll just enter the good old Hollywood number and duplicate that five five five five five five five five five five got a check there to confirm it was entered properly both times this is where you would choose your carrier a large majority of customers are going to be under this 18 te Verizon Sprint or t-mobile category if you have a specific carrier that's listed here separately you can certainly select that if you're finding that your carrier is not listed in this list the workaround to that would be to create an email and actually enter your 10-digit phone number so one five five five five five five five five five five at whatever the SMS or MMS email to email to MMS or email to SMS gateway is you can usually Google this depending on the carrier you might find that they don't have you know them listed here if that's the case what you can do is just search or reach out to your carrier to determine what their SMS gateway is it's essentially an email gateway that by type by typing in the leading 10 digit phone number with with the the suffix of whatever that gateway is it will redirect things to your phone and text form so again email SMS using the built in carriers if your built in carrier is showing here you can certainly type in your your full phone number here at whatever the gateway is I believe ATT you know dotnet might be one of them I can't remember off offhand V text I think was one four for Verizon but again those are listed as carriers here you can easily pull up an SMS email gateway list online and and determine if that's going to work for you after sending the signal so we'll go ahead and just put our email back in here and will reenter and I will choose the carrier here again we'll use this the generic for big carriers this is contact info so there it is if they wanted that any other points of contact you could add them here let's say you and your wife both want to get emails both want to get texts on the same user set up here or if this was you know going to be a general user for all the employees in your office and they're gonna share the same code you can certainly add as many emails and text as you want here and then when you're done hit continue in this case we're just gonna set up one user one email one text so we'll continue so bump us to you to section 3 known as user access and here's where it gets a little tricky only if you have multiple locations and again if you only have one maybe a little bit more straightforward I have three so just to show you one location at a time I can check the box for the location which will enable access to everything on that location in this case enabling z-wave access meaning you know thermostat control a lock control lights everything that is in the automation section here this is where you would map in the code so you'd want to put in a new unique code type that write in and then once that's typed in you can apply this code to this location only or do it to all locations now this was a user that you wanted to set up and have access to multiple locations you could in this case we'll just do this location just to show you some of the other possibilities of other things you can you can check check off for access on a user we have a lyric controller here a little different than the lynx touch where we can enable not only automation control we can enable the built-in camera so on the lyric there's a built-in camera on the front display a that will show snapshots so you could enable the ability for this user to see in the event log those snapshots and and download them access them if you don't want that simply uncheck it Wi-Fi doorbell if you have a skybell video doorbell you can access you know video footage from that device here for this user if you want to enable that again if you don't don't have to same with automation and let's say we want we only want them to be able to arm and disarm locally at the at the security system actually locally its security system and be able to arm a disarm from Total Connect but we don't want to give them full access automation in order to click anything into the user code we'll have to first check this security system off if we check this here then it'll add everything if we just check here it'll simply add security access right we won't be able to add a user code in here until this is checked ok so once that's checked we can type in a new code and there we go if you want to show it to confirm that it went improperly you can do that hide it show it hide it again we can do again apply this code to this location only and then we can move to the next if we just close that by clicking the arrow here move to the last panel let's save this phone we want to give full access and automation this is where we can add another code and another four digit code here we can show and hide I'm just putting in a generic code here make sure that this is not a duplicate code if you have an existing master code installer code any other users that are already on the system you will not be able to reuse that code here you can only have one code per slot so just keep that in mind once you've added all the codes you want you can hit create user and that will essentially create welcome emails to all those users ok so Jane Doe at gmail.com whoever she is be curious actually who has that email but that email will show up and they'll receive alerts of saying hey you know welcome to Total Connect look at that welcome email and they'll be able to log in and create first create a password and then be able to log right in to the to the Total Connect web interface you'll notice that it says not synced you'll notice that it says needs verification so this is where it gets a little tricky after you create a user they will need to verify their identity by clicking on the link that they receive ok until they do that they won't be verified and they won't be able to receive alerts furthermore on alerts the UDF do then go to your notifications and add this user to whatever user groups you need and then enable notifications for them as well if you want them to receive notifications the last thing here is the syncing when you're first setting these up the verification might involve a third party or whoever that user is and they may not be with you at the time so you just have to reach out to them shoot them a text email them call them let them know hey you need to verify this if you want alerts but when you're setting this up the first thing you want to do after you configure the user is do a user sync so you'll see the state here shows not synced you'll notice that up on the top right we can just kind of toggle between these locations you'll notice so a little syncing icon there but if we go to if we actually scroll go back to the menu here nope if we go to events we'll be able to load our events here and on the lyric panels you'll notice that the sync is automated that you know just a few minutes ago we we actually pushed through a user sync automatically so as soon as that Kogut added the lyric control is smart enough to say hey it looks like a new users added let's go ahead and push that to the system not all use not all alarm systems will do that so if you toggle up here and we go to the 21ip for example you'll notice that excuse me that as of today earlier today there was a user sink but that was manual that was something that I pushed on our end through Total Connect the Vista panel unfortunately due to just the technological infrastructure on the Vista system doesn't have the ability to automate those user sinks or zones things for that matter so it's something have to do manually so you want to go to locations and you want to choose that location just click Edit over here with a little pencil icon [Music] again this is only something you'll have to do on this Vista panel and you'll have two different types of sinks here you know the panel sink the panel sink will pull in automation devices burglary sensors and you know new zones you add things like that this this the user sink is something that's going to push new users specifically so we'll go ahead and click synchronize users or sync users there which is in blue and we'll get that to sync here as soon as this process starts we can you'll notice that this Gray's out and you won't have the ability to sync until that process completes whether it goes through successfully or fails we'll have to see let's go into events here so we can see here user sync begins this user sync success again was from earlier today a few hours earlier and this user sync begins is gonna log here and it will take you can take upwards of two maybe even three minutes in some cases for these things to go through especially if you're on cellular only if you have internet service on on your Vista panel then it should go through fairly quick but we'll be able to get the timestamp here and see so you'll notice I went through in about 45 seconds user sync came through that confirms that now that code has been pushed to that panel okay it's very important to realize that unless you get that user sync success on the event log for each location that you enabled that code has not been pushed to that alarm system so it might be here on Total Connect they may very well have a Total Connect user but until that user actually gets pushed down to the alarm system meaning that it's you know it's downloaded from the AlarmNet server where Total Connect is hosted down to your alarm panel at your home or business that user code will not work at the panel so until you see this user seeing success don't expect to be able to arm and disarm locally with that code nor should you be able to arm or disarm with that Total Connect user from from Total Connect because that code hasn't been pushed to the system so again that's something you have to do per location we can just just to show you here we can go to the l7000 which happens to be a lynx touch panel and you see here that user sync failed okay so this is another thing that you know I've noticed you know can happen the reason why I'm showing you this is I actually have pulled my l7000 off the Wi-Fi just to kind of show you what may happen if your system is offline at the time of adding a user it will it is automated just like a lyric but it will only try once so if it fails and then you internet restores later you will have to manually push that again you'll be able to see here in the user section by going to all location users you'll see here let's go to Jane Doe the one we just created and you'll see it's already assigned a slot number but it actually hasn't pushed the system according to the event log so now would be a matter of working with your your security your alarm company to make sure that your system is online if it's a Wi-Fi issue just make sure that you get your assistant plugged back into the proper Wi-Fi locally once it's back online then you want to initiate that sync again so go back to locations being that this was automated you didn't have to do this the first time and what you may notice when you circle back here is you know maybe by then let's go ahead and let this load for a moment what you'll notice is we can go ahead and hit sync users will get the blue button again it will then gray out after it starts going through and if we go back to events we'll see here that it actually didn't initiate again so what we'll want to do is there we go so at 4:55 which is right now we have the user sync begins I imagine this will fail again because our system our l7000 in the lab and the other room is offline so what we'll we'll double check that but what you want to do is basically hang on this screen and wait and just see you know does a failure does it go through successfully never assume that it goes through automatically even on the lyric and lynx touch panels that are automated there will be a message whether or not is it's successful in its automatic push the vistas on the other hand like I said you will have to manually push but again just make sure to check these event logs make sure the user sync goes through successfully once you're done pushing those codes to the system I always recommend locally checking them and it looks like one of my texts in the other room didn't like getting the con failure so they got it back on Wi-Fi that means that usually sings success we got that code to push it back down to the system so now we have all three panels on our Total Connect login with new users all done right here from the web I'm using Total Connect no need to do anything locally at the system now you could do this you know right from the comfort of your own home and you can do it from multiple different locations at once once all those user codes are pushed I do recommend locally testing these you can log in to that specific user arm and disarm from each location my toggling through here in the security section or you can just locally at the panel plug-in those codes make sure you can arm and disarm with them realize that these are not master codes or installer codes these are just regular sub-user codes you should be able to intermittently arm and disarm with these codes amongst each other and also amongst the master code installer and guest codes are going to have different authority levels meaning that they can only disarm the system when those codes were used sub users anything that you adding new from Total Connect will be a sub user that will make things easy to be able to arm and disarm interchangeably using your master code or any of those sub users so if you have any further questions on adding or deleting users which I'm going to show you in just a second here you can definitely email us at support at alarm grid comm and I want to just show you the last step which is going to be going into the users will go to our all locations and again you may not see this if you don't have multiple locations we'll go to this user and when we come in here we can actually create this entire user what this will do is it'll actually delete all three codes from each system or excuse me all three codes each individual code from each system so we would hit delete now if I hit no here I want to show you something else you can do if you want to temporarily remove access for a for a user you can hit this this section here to actually disable the user status when you hit disable user status you still need to sync and you if you read this note here you'll see that you will need to re-enter the code later if you do that so this is basically a temporary way to keep them with the Total Connect access but disable their ability to arm and disarm for now we'll actually do a full will actually do a full on deletion here and in order to do that we'll just kind of cancel out for now being that that the leet user section has been grayed out from us messing around in there if we come back into the user section we will click delete user go ahead and click yes once that has been deleted you'll get that message click ok now again if we go to the events you'll notice that your lyric panel or URL seven thousands we have the automated the automated sync right on the l7000 on our lyric we have the automated sync okay so that already pushed that already what this did is a sync the users meaning that it wiped that code from the system if we go to the l7000 and we just looked at will notice that the users sync is still running here so that it might take a little bit longer on some of these to point out why in this case this one's taking longer we actually have a cell backup on this on this l7000 which is actually probably why it's moving a little bit slower if we move to the last panel here which is the vista 21ip what you'll notice is the last this sync was from 8 minutes ago so we'll need to we'll need to manually push this so we'll go to locations click the pencil here and then go ahead and sync users and you may notice if I click back here now it's showing panel sync before it actually did have a green checkmark sometimes these become out of sync and Total Connect can take a little bit of time to catch up to realize it's out of sync it's always a good thing to run the sync manually just in case if you go to the event log it's not going to lie so if you you know are under the 20 under the Vista panel location and you have you know your last sync was hours earlier or not in live time this is when you want to run the sync you make sure it comes through now we have user sync success and we know that that panel should be that user code has been removed from the Vista panel so that is how you add and delete user codes from we'll connect on the web if you have any other questions regarding adding or maintaining user codes in general on Total Connect you can email us at support at alarm grid comm if you found this video helpful or useful pre please like the channel actually please like the video and don't forget to subscribe to our Channel