Dealing with unclaimed workspaces

What are unclaimed workspaces?

Each Emsisoft license comes with a workspace, a virtual entity that represents the user’s place or organization. Workspaces are used to manage all of the devices of a particular user on a single screen, and can store protection policies, infection reports and more. Workspaces also provide tools for investigating malware incidents.

When you sign up for a new Emsisoft account, you’re asked to set up your workspace, which includes: Naming the workspace; defining whether you want to manage your devices locally, remotely or both; choosing a product edition; and setting an administrator password to protect your devices from threat actors.

However, in certain situations, a workspace may be created before the actual user account is available. This can lead to “unclaimed” or “anonymous” workspaces that have no owner yet.

Scenario 1: User installs through the offline installer and activates their license via coupon

Some users may not want or need to use their 30-day trial period and install the software through an offline installer. When they activate the software through a coupon in the license dialog, a new workspace is created in the background.

Activation via coupon in software

Scenario 2: Partner installs software for an unknown user

It’s common for break-fix services to (pre)install Emsisoft protection software for their customers, including product activation. However, in most cases, the partner doesn’t have access to the customer’s email account to sign them up for an Emsisoft account.

In this situation, partners are advised to create anonymous workspaces through the Emsisoft Partner Portal and use the new workspace’s custom installer to install and activate the software in one go without any user interaction required.

Creating a new anonymous workspace via the Partner Portal

After creating a new anonymous workspace, it will show up in your Partner Dashboard like this:

An unclaimed/anonymous workspace in the workspaces list

Open the workspace and you’ll get the installer that automatically connects the device to your workspace:

Install and connect new devices to the anonymous workspace

Claiming a workspace as a user

Users will see the following notification popup on their devices when they’re connected to an unclaimed workspace:

Notification about unclaimed workspace

Note: Those notifications can be suppressed for a selected interval if needed. However, we do not recommend doing so, as the user will be unable to take advantage of all the advanced protection and incident investigation features of the Emsisoft Management Console that are only accessible via the workspace.

When clicking ‘Complete setup now’, users are guided through the process of signing up for an Emsisoft user account. Once completed, the first login at MyEmsisoft will show the following dialog to claim the workspace:

Name the workspace

Select a security management mode

Once these basic setup steps are completed, the workspace is officially owned by the user and nobody else will be able to claim it.

Just seconds later, the Emsisoft user interface will reflect the changes;

Emsisoft protection software is connected to the workspace