Management of users, roles and groups in AWD is fully featured, but has its roots in functionality that was created decades ago. There are currently 15 different screens used to manage users, roles and groups in AWD today, and in many cases, they need to be visited in a very particular order to make something happen.
DST is in the process of rewriting the user management functions, and Angela Veach and Arti Acharya (the experience designer) presented the wireframe designs in progress. This is greatly simplified in terms of the number of screens and in terms of the language used on those screens, such as:
- Create a new user, specifying general attributes such as name, user ID, security level and work group. This can be done using another user or a model user as a template, such that privileges, experience levels and resources are inherited from the model.
- Manage what they can work on, by assigning one or more roles, assigning individual privileges such as specific business areas or work types that are beyond the capabilities of the assigned roles, and assigning experience level.
- Manage what they can see in AWD, by assigning security group, and additional individual resource access control grouped by product/capability.
- Specify resource-specific attributes, which are the additional parameters required for the different capabilities to which they have access, e.g., the signature that will be used for correspondence generation if they have access to the correspondence capabilities.
They’re still working out the details on this, and are actively soliciting ideas from their customers in the audience. There are a lot of options here, such as whether selecting a model user should replace or augment the existing privileges on a user account.
This appears to be a new interface on the existing structure of users, roles, skills and permissions, rather than a new underlying structure, meaning that it doesn’t impact much in terms of operational functions (except a new dialog to select their primary workspace if they have been assigned to multiple), mostly just these administration screens. There is a still a very complex structure that needs to be well-understood by an administrator, but at least the administration screens will make it easier to implement. Lots of happy sysadmins in the audience.
As with case management, this is unreleased functionality still under development, likely to be released in 2013.
This was the last session of this first day of AWD Advance 2012; we’re off to the reception and conference dinners tonight, and will resume tomorrow. I have been assured that dinner will not involved Lipizzan stallions or palaces, although I might see a cow sometime before I leave tomorrow.