34 Support

Users and Passwords: New Group Assignments

Even after its release, our developers continue to improve upon TOPS v3.2.1™ in response to your feedback. One such new feature answers a need for organizations converting the Users and Passwords from the old system to the new. This new feature allows your company's IT Administrator to quickly and easily reassign users to new user groups that he or she defines. To best understand the new feature, I should first explain how the Users and Passwords conversion works from version 3.1 to version 3.2.1.

Users and Passwords in TOPS 2000™ 3.1 did not use 'true' user groups, meaning that although a user was assigned to a group, that user could have different rights and privileges than another user assigned to the same group. This presents a problem when converting users to 3.2.1, which uses a true group rights structure. To resolve the issue without causing any change in the rights of the users that had been set up in 3.1, our conversion utility assigns each user from version 3.1 to a unique user group bearing the user's name.

The first time TOPS v3.2.1™ is run (by ANY user) the users and passwords from the old system are automatically converted to the new users and passwords system. So when your company first converts to 3.2.1, each user will retain the same rights and privileges they had before, allowing you to use the system 'out of the box' as it were. However, we highly recommend that you take the time to set up just the few role-based user groups you need, and move all of your users into these few groups. This may present more set up work in the beginning, but maintaining your users will be significantly easier in the long run.

This is where the new feature comes in. After the conversion, Go to "Administration", "Users and Passwords", click "Groups", and define the groups you wish to assign for all of your users. Next, rather than going into each individual user to assign them to a new user group, you can now click on the "Settings" button in Users and passwords, and select the "Assign User Groups" tab. Select users on the left (click and shift click to add a range, or Ctrl+A to select all) and click the blue plus to add the selected users to the list on the right side. Next, select the group name to which you wish to assign the selected users and click "Assign Now" to reassign the selected users to the groups.

All that's left to do now is go into groups and delete all of the empty groups that you no longer need. Remember you cannot delete a group with users assigned to it, so make sure that you have reassigned all of your users first.

Users and Passwords and the Global Module

I wanted to add one important note to this article that does not specifically apply to the new utility, but is a factor in your determination of user rights in the new Users and Passwords. You may have heard that the Global module was pulled out as a seperate sellable* module in the system, and new functionality such as Global AP and Global Reports were added to the module.

This change does have an important effect to Users and Passwords, since the global module is simply that - global for all of the associations you have loaded into TOPS. For this reason, the Global module cannot be set to Read Only status, and furthermore, it ignores users' community restrictions**.

For that reason, we highly recommend that you only provide access to the global module for employees who are authorized to view information contained in all of the associations in your portfolio.

*This additional cost does not affect existing users of TOPS 2000™, as you were grandfathered in to automatically receive the module.

**Community restrictions do apply to the Lockbox and Form Letter Manager tabs of the Global module.

by Andrea Drennen

What's On TOPS?
For regular TOPS News and Info, Subscribe to the OnTOPS Ezine!

Click Here to Manage Your TOPS Subscriptions.

NOW OPEN: Online Support Center!
The TOPS Online Support Center lets you track support tickets, billing minutes and more for your Client ID. Create your account today!

Link to TOPS
Do you have a web site? Link to TOPS Software!

The Legacy of TOPS Software Lives on at 212 Software!

Add 212 SoftwareTo Your Favorites!