Security Roles

This help file applies to an out-of-date version of MainBoss.
The most recent version of MainBoss is MainBoss 4.2.4.
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Security roles make it possible for your organization to restrict access to information. By assigning a role to a MainBoss user, you give that user permission to perform various operations within MainBoss.

In many cases, a single user will be given multiple security roles. Each new role that a user receives will give additional permissions to that person. If a user has no assigned roles, the user cannot use any feature in MainBoss; therefore, when you add a new user to the MainBoss Users table, you should assign that person at least one role.

Important: Each built-in security role has a brief description and a much longer "Comments" field describing how the role works. We strongly recommend that you read the "Comments" to understand the role in detail.

There are several general types of security roles:

We recommend that organizations be generous in assigning Summary roles, but cautious in handing out roles that allow wider access to information.

In addition to the selective roles listed above, there is a role called All. This grants a user permission to use every aspect of the program. We recommend that you avoid using All; too often, we have seen organizations give All permission to users without thinking about it. Instead of taking the shortcut of All, decide which permissions a particular user really needs and only give the user those permissions.

Security roles are listed in the Security Role table (Administration | Security Role). To give someone one or more security roles, you open that person's record from the Users table (Administration | Users) and go to the record's Security Roles section. You then use Assign Role to add role records to the user's list of roles. Each role record contains a "Comments" field explaining what permissions the role provides.

Some security roles combine with each other to provide users with more information. For example, if you have both ItemSummary and WorkOrderView, you can see more information about the items on a work order than either ItemSummary or WorkOrderView would provide individually.

When you assign security roles to a user, it can be difficult to figure out the effect of those roles: what the user can and can't do with the roles you've assigned. To make it easier to see the effects of a person's security roles, you can use the Evaluate Security As button in Administration | Users. For more information, see Viewing Users.

For information on viewing security roles, see Viewing Security Roles. For information on creating and editing user records, see Editing Security Role Records.

See Also:

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