Today, I got chance to speak with our ERP Director, Olaf Laos about security privileges within Dynamics GP. Along with our Technical Director Anthony Sale, they developed our GP Elementz and I was keen to understand from Olaf what had inspired it.
Here is Olaf’s view on user permissions in Dynamics GP and the final straw that led to the development of our popular Security Informer add-on.
What instigated you to look at creating Security Informer?
“It all came about during an implementation of Dynamics GP for a company operating in the manufacturing sector. When users tried to access a particular window, a ‘security privileges’ message would pop-up – but when the ‘OK’ button was pressed, it continued through to the window as normal. This ‘security privileges’ message was therefore irritating to the customer and it was not obvious what the permission related to.
It made no sense to me, so I spent several hours trying to work out what the source window could be. I had to resort to a trial and error exercise of going through every window in the relevant dictionaries, switching on access to each, one at a time and then testing the user’s access to the target window. I eventually found the cause – it was an obscure window with the title ‘Hidden’!
This did annoy me, as it had been a real waste of my time. I therefore spoke with our development team about solving the problem of the lack of information surrounding ‘privilege’ messages.”
Were other Dynamics GP users experiencing the same problem?
“Yes. But to be clear, the problem I am referring to is the lack of security information and the wasted time it results in. Our support team and our implementation consultants, as well as the IT administrators at our Customers sites regularly have to deal with the issue of resolving security permissions. And this often involves wasted time trying to work out what window or report is the cause – and this can take more effort if there are modified or alternate dictionaries in use.”
How did you find a solution to this ?
"The solution was to display the information to help the administrator adjust the security settings. Clearly Dynamics GP must know what it is denying access to – we needed to tap into that and make it available”
How does Security Informer solve the problem?
"Essentially Security Informer still does the simple things really well. It just runs in the background and as soon as the user gets a security privileges message, the program springs in to life and displays the on-screen reason.
It is really simple for the user, they can contact IT and explain exactly what the problem is and where they should check to fix it. Security Informer has also proven to be especially useful when users move from older versions of Dynamics GP where the old style security model system was in place."
A huge thank you to Olaf for providing that unique insight.
Security Informer is now a valuable on screen messaging tool that provides information about a user’s access rights, it is currently available for free, you will need to be quick though as this offer ends on December 20, 2017. If you would like a copy, please visit our website , fill in the and we will organise it for you.
Written by Richard Loydall, Sales and Marketing Director at ISC Software
