Grenadine Enterprise Edition Configuration

Introduction

Some customers use Grenadine Event Management Software in an enterprise environment and need specific features to enable a more wide-scale usage within their company. Some customers also require a personalized URL to use our event planning system, so that their staff understands that Grenadine is an event planning solution approved by their company.

There are two main areas of integration that can be implemented to facilitate these requirements:

1. Configure your system to run Grenadine Event Management Software under your own corporate domain (ex: https://events.acme.com, rather than https://events.grenadine.co)
2. Configure your system to run Grenadine public event websites under your own corporate domain (ex: https://sites.events.acme.com rather than https://sites.events.grenadine.co)
3. Configure your DNS to allow Grenadine to send emails on behalf of your own email addresses (ex: events@acme.com instead of no-reply@grenadine.co)

Here are the steps required to implement these two custom configurations:

1. Setting up event planning under your own corporate domain

By default, all Grenadine event planning customers will be assigned a subdomain of grenadine.co, for example, if your company is named “Acme”, your Grenadine URL might be https://acme.grenadine.co. In order to brand your enterprise version of Grenadine, you can also use a custom corporate domain where all of your event planning tools will be hosted under one URL. This will usually be a sub-domain of your main organization domain, for example, https://events.acme.com.

In order to set up a subdomain to point to Grenadine, simply create a subdomain of your main organization URL, direct it to your corporate load balancer or reverse proxy server, and proxy the Grenadine Enterprise Event Management Software. In the same way, also create a wildcard DNS to the same subdomain, proxy it to the Grenadine enterprise address:

https://events.acme.com –> proxy to cname enterprise.grenadine.co

https://*.events.acme.com –> proxy to cname enterprise.grenadine.co

Because frontline event planner and attendees will still go through your corporate load balancer or corporate reverse-proxy, you’ll probably need to permanently accept Grenadine SSL certificates. This will ensure that all your event planning data is transferred securely between your users and Grenadine Event Management Software.

Note: It’s important that you point your traffic to the actual enterprise.grenadine.co CNAME rather than to specific IPs, as Grenadine IPs can and do change over time.

2. Setting up public event websites under your own domain

By default, all public event websites generated by Grenadine will be assigned a slug under the domain sites.grenadine.co. For example, if your company hosts an event called “Sales Conference 2019”, Grenadine might assign the URL https://sites.grenadine.co/sites/sales-conference-2019.

In order to set up your own base domain to host all sites, simply create the “sites” subdomain under your new event management corporate domain, and proxy it to Grenadine enterprise event sites. In this case, you don’t need to create a wildcard under “sites. Here’s an example: if your planning domain is “events.acme.com”, configure the following proxying rules:

https://sites.events.acme.com –> proxy to cname enterprise.grenadine.co

Note: Depending on how you set up Step 1 in your system, this step may already be set up by default because of the wildcard https://*.events.acme.com that you have added.

3. Allowing Grenadine to send emails from your corporate email domain

The second step in your personalization is to configure your DNS server to allow Grenadine to send an email on your behalf. This will make it so that when Grenadine sends emails to your users, those emails will “from” your official email address instead of a Grenadine email address. As an example, if your company is named Acme, order confirmation emails might come from events@acme.com rather than the default no-reply@grenadine.co. This not only has the benefit of presenting a more consistent branding to your attendees but also allows replies to go to your correct email box.

In order to allow Grenadine to send an email on your behalf, our team will generate DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) records that will provide proof to the outside email recipients that email you send through Grenadine originates from your domain and is authentic. DKIM signatures are saved and stored to your domain’s DNS system.

There are 2 types of records that you must add to your DNS in order to enable this:

• A Domain verification record
• A set of DKIM records

Here are examples of what such records might look like (note: this example uses Amazon SES as a configured sender):

_amazonses.acme.com, TXT, oVVDqF6aCIC/nHl3r6542sfsYTlkiAlleFILSRhsMU=

z2a72iuzdbc6jitr5ufzexau3a6o6pux._domainkey.acme.com, CNAME, z2a72iuzd5425itr5ufzexau3a6o6pux.dkim.amazonses.com

u5u26tuwojnbadmyzdmmizwcvi._domainkey.acme.com, CNAME, z2a72iuzd5425itr5sdfsdfsdfsdfsdux.dkim.amazonses.com

Once you’ve entered the records that you obtained from our team in your corporate DNS, we’ll validate them and configure outbound email sending with your domain.