Preventing our users from accidentally creating trial or sharing accounts

Question

Does anyone have any tips on discouraging your users from accidentally creating a trial or sharing account with their organization email address? A significant portion of my Qualtrics admin work entails advising people who have created trial or sharing accounts, developed a project in that account, and are then stymied by the limits from these accounts when they try to distribute it.

We use SSO authentication for Qualtrics, so a current university affiliate can get started with Qualtrics just by signing in the first time. We don't make them request the account. I have seen that when users go straight to Qualtrics.com and try to fill out the "Create a free account" form, it notices their umich.edu email address and says "hold on there, you should go through umich.qualtrics.com." When they use that address, it authenticates with our SSO and they get an account in our environment with all the privileges we pay for. So I assume these accounts are being created through the messages that auto-fire when a survey owner shares their project with one or more email addresses.

I know trial accounts can be moved to our brand, but these days that typically takes six weeks or more, and I would really like to nip this in the bud in '18. I would welcome ideas from any campus (or business) that has conquered this problem.

MichelleC · Accepted Answer

Honestly, for us (just up the road!  :)  ), it really comes down to communication. We have a web portal (qualtrics.msu.edu) that's very visible in our MSU.edu google searches. We have also done some broad communication in our IT newsletters, blog posts, etc about the MSU license and made the login link very visible. In addition, because we integrated a ton of different licenses into our current enterprise license, the former brand administrators in the various colleges and departments are good boots-on-the-ground resources for faculty and staff who have questions about how to use the systems, where to login, etc.

JulieT · Answer

@britain SSO authentication has significantly cut down on the trial accounts. Like @MichelleC mentioned, the colleges who have heavy Qualtrics users do a good job relaying information to colleagues and students. Curious, I tried creating a free account. For some reason this appeared, even though we have a license. (Looks like I'll be contacting Qualtrics)  Students and faculty must be doing a good job double checking, because I haven't had a trial account in about a year. We have Qualtrics listed  in our Knowldegebase, so where to sign in/up appears immediately in a google search. !

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