Getting started with profiles

When should you use a Sunshine profile vs. a user/organization field? Also, can a profile attribute be used for triggers or automation?

For example, we'd love to sync data about a user using the Sunshine API. Things like their name, email, current OS, current OS version, current subscription plan, company name (for business users), when they signed up, etc. However, some of these attributes we may want to use with our triggers/automation. For example, if a user is on our Enterprise plan, we'll want them to show up in the appropriate view, SLA, receive an appropriate auto-reply when they submit a new request, etc. Is this possible?

Thanks!

Hello Allen,

Sunshine attributes are not available in triggers yet, but this tighter integration is on the product's roadmap. There has been no firm, announced ETA for this, however.

Sunshine Profiles are meant to bring in the user's set of identifying attributes from one or more systems that may be in an enterprise environment. You can identify a user and get that more native, third-party profile information and access & use it within Zendesk. The idea is to capture and tie user information and events from third-party systems and maintain that in Zendesk.

Organizations and Profiles can be complementary. You can take advantage of Organization features that help you organize and restrict tickets for workflow purposes, while using Profiles to maintain integrations with third-party systems.

You can also look at User custom fields. These can also be used to capture information unique to a user and can be synchronized through a backend script using Zendesk Support REST APIs. These User custom field values can possibly be used in triggers.

What you use probably depends on bigger design decisions than can be covered here. The simplest way to capture custom user data is to use User custom fields. For a larger customized solution, you may want to use Sunshine Custom Objects. There's more than one option here depending on what you need.

If you do get deeper into Sunshine Profiles & Events, I'd encourage you to post in the community forum focused on this area at: Sunshine Profiles and Events community

Hope this helps!

Hi Allen,

It will really depend on how you want to structure your workflow. Sunshine profile are based of a User in Support but is more intended to be save data from multiple external system so that you get get a richer user profile without having to add tons of fields to the Zendesk User.

On triggers and automations, as of now you cannot use Sunshine profile information but you can use Zendesk User's custom fields and Organization's custom fields to set SLA, ticket fields or send appropriate email placeholder only allow ticket custom fields or default org/user field.

So that is partially possible. If you want to have a balance of data from Sunshine to Support, you may need to implement a script update either side via API (you fetch Sunshine data then update the User profile by API and vice versa) and use trigger and automation based of those custom fields.

Hope that this helps!