zitadel/site/docs/administrate/02-organisations.md

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Organizations

What are organizations

Organizations are comparable to tenants of a system or OU's (organizational units) if we speak of a directory based system. ZITADEL is organized around the idea that

• multiple organizations share the same System
• these organizations can grant each other rights to self-manage certain things (eg, delegating roles)
• organizations are a vessels for users and projects

Global organization

The global organization holds users that are not assigned to any other organization in the System. Thus ZITADEL provides a global organization for users who manage their accounts on their own.

Example

Let's look at our example company `acme.ch`: Suppose ACME sells online-tickets for concert venues. ACME created an organization `iam` to manage their own enterprise users (employees) and projects to manage the provided services. They also created an organization `b2b-partner-1`, allowing the partner self-manage their access. A partner could be a concert venue, that can administrate the backend of the service (e.g. posting new concerts, setting up billing, ...), and you want to allow them to self-manage access of users (e.g. employees of the venue) to their backend. Lastly, the organization `global` holds all the b2c customers of `acme.ch` that registered to the service to buy concert tickets.

Create an organization without existing login

ZITADEL allows you to create a new organization without a pre-existing user. For ZITADEL.ch you can create a org by visiting the Register organization

Screenshot here

Dedicated Instance

For dedicated ZITADEL instances this URL might be different, but in most cases should be something like https://accounts.YOURDOMAIN.TLD/register/org

Create an organization with existing login

You can simply create a new organization by visiting the ZITADEL Console and clicking "new organization" in the upper left corner.

Screenshot here

Dedicated Instance

For dedicated ZITADEL instances this URL might be different, but in most cases should be something like `https://console.YOURDOMAIN.TLD`

Verify a domain name

Once you created your organization you will receive a generated domain name from ZITADEL for your organization. For example if you call your organization ACME you will receive acme.zitadel.ch as name. Furthermore the users you create will be suffixed with this domain name. To improve the user experience you can verify a domain name which you control. If you control acme.ch you can verify the ownership by DNS or HTTP challenge. After the domain is verified your users can use both domain names to log-in. The user "coyote" can now use "coyote@acme.zitadel.ch" and "coyote@acme.ch". An organization can have multiple domain names, but only one of it can be primary. The primary domain defines which login name ZITADEL displays to the user, and also what information gets asserted in access_tokens (preferred_username).

Browse to your organization by visiting https://console.zitadel.ch/org.

Add the domain to your organization by clicking the button Add Domain.

Organization Overview

Input the domain in the input field and click Add

Organization Add Domain

Organization Domain Added

To start the domain verification click the domain name and a dialog will appear, where you can choose between DNS or HTTP challenge methods.

Organization Domain Verify

For example, create a TXT record with your DNS provider for the used domain and click verify. **ZITADEL** will then proceed an check your DNS.

Organization Domain Verify DNS

Do not delete the verification code ZITADEL will recheck the ownership from time to time

When the verification is successful you have the option to activate the domain by clicking Set as primary

Organization verified

This changes the preferred loginnames of your users as indicated here.

Congratulations your are done! You can check this by visiting https://console.zitadel.ch/users/me

User Personal Information

This only works when the user is member of this organization

Manage Organization ZITADEL Roles

You can assign users management roles to your new organization.

Manage ZITADEL Roles 1

Manage ZITADEL Roles 2

Audit organization changes

All changes to the organization are displayed on the organization menu within ZITADEL Console organization menu. Located on the right hand side under "activity".

Screenshot here