10.01 Planning User & Group Config

Any individual that uses FastClose, will require their own FastClose user adding to the system. However, before starting to add users to the system, it is worth taking a few momenet to think about how they can be grouped together as it can make collaborative working much easier later on.

There are two main ways that groups make life easier.

• The first is report sharing. By setting up a group it is easy to make a report available to all the members of that group simply by giving the group a read (or full control) permission to the report. This is a lot quicker than having to specify the users individually. It also means that as users join or leave groups they automatically gain or lose visibility.

  Report and Folder Permissions can be configured either through the web interface (in the Repository Explorer area) or in the Open/Save dialogs of the Designer application by right clicking on a report/folder and selecting “Change Permissions”.

• The second is for dimension security. FastClose has a native security solution that makes it possible to restrict a user or group's access to certain regions of the ERP database. So you might hide salary data or lock down cost centres so that cost centre managers can only see their cost centres and no one else’s. Where users can be grouped together – it can make this configuration easier and less repetitious. Dimension Security is configured within the web interface.

As a rule of thumb Groups usually follow the departments that users work in. So if in doubt, creating a group for each department that will use FastClose, is a good place to start.

It is worth noting that there are two "special" groups in FastClose:

• Administrators - anyone that is a member of this group automatically gets full rights to all reports and folders in the system and can carry out any piece of configuration.

• Everyone - by definition, everyone is a member of the Everyone group. Users cannot be removed from it. It's a useful when assiging rights to your least restricted reports and folders.