What are the steps for scoping and implementation?

Here are the important high-level considerations and recommendations to achieve a successful go-live with Cobrowse.

Implementation overview

We recommend breaking down the implementation process into the following three phases. 

1. Scoping
2. Pre-production
3. Production

Scoping

Scoping is the determination of all of the implementation steps across various teams to implement Cobrowse for your organization. It will follow from the organization's underlying business requirements, and require an understanding of how Cobrowse will be configured and deployed to meet those requirements. 

Scoping is designed to answer the following questions:

1. How will agents authenticate themselves? 
   
   1. Automatically via a pre-built integration?
   2. Single sign-on (SSO) integration?
   3. Programmatically generated JSON Web Tokens (JWTs)?
   4. Email login? 
   5. How will you manage access?
2. Which platforms and features will be enabled / disabled?
   1. Website co-browsing only (including mobile web), or mobile co-browsing with Android and iOS platform SDKs?
   2. Full device mode, or co-browsing confined to your specific apps and/or websites?
   3. Can agents request remote control?
   4. Customized consent prompts?
   5. Data masking for redaction of sensitive fields?
   6. Should sessions be recorded for audit and training purposes?
3. Which hosting model is chosen?
   1. Cobrowse Cloud Hosting (Global, US-only, or EU-only)?
   2. Self-hosted in client's AWS, Azure, or GCP?
   3. Self-hosted on-premise?
4. Which channels and user flows will be used to initiate co-browse?
   1. A chat interaction will be upgraded to a co-browse session?
   2. A 6-digit support code is shared between end-user and agent?
   3. An agent will see the end-user's device listed in real time, and click a "smart button" to connect?

These are high-level questions to consider during scoping. Full technical documentation for all configuration options is available at https://docs.cobrowse.io/

Self-hosting only

In addition to the above:

1. Which dedicated domain will be used to host the instance?
2. Do you also require a dedicated non-production instance? Which dedicated domain?
3. Review the documentation and requirements for your deployment platform.
4. Sizing: https://docs.cobrowse.io/enterprise-self-hosting/sizing-guidelines
5. Metrics: https://docs.cobrowse.io/enterprise-self-hosting/monitoring-your-instance
6. Network, Proxy, Firewall considerations: https://docs.cobrowse.io/enterprise-self-hosting/advanced

Pre-production

Pre-production encompasses all of the implementation steps conducted against non-production environments in order to configure and validate the solution as much as possible before going live. 

The Cobrowse solution is made up of three components as follows.

1. Client-side SDKs (eg. Web, Android, iOS, etc) deployed to your websites and apps
2. Agent-side UI/UX (eg. pre-built or custom 3rd party integrations, the Cobrowse dashboard, custom embeds)
3. Cobrowse backend services (eg. Cloud hosted SaaS vs. self-hosted by the client)

Documentation covering the implementation steps needed for all three components is available at https://docs.cobrowse.io/. 

Once the solution has been validated in pre-production, it is time to go live! 

Production

Once the solution has been validated and approved in pre-production, it's time to deploy to production and make the solution available to your agents. This can be done in stages, or all at once, depending on your preference. 

The process for "going live" will depend on your internal change management and deployment process. The high-level steps we recommend will be the same.

1. Validate pre-production
2. Deploy to production
3. Validate production