Managing Access to the Customer Portal: To Create Roles for Employees of a Customer

MYOB Advanced provides the predefined Portal User role, which allows users to view and work with the company profile and company documents, including contracts and financial documents. A user with this role can create, modify, or delete contacts associated with the company. These are powerful access rights that you might want to avoid assigning to everyone in a customer's company. You can create another role with restricted access to contact creation.

In the following implementation activity, you will create two roles for the Customer Portal, both of which are based on copies of the existing Portal User role.

Story

Suppose that your company wants to have different access rights for users of the Customer Portal. You want to have two roles for the Customer Portal users: one for administrators of customer organizations (Customer Admin), and another for users of customer organizations (Customer User). You need to create a new role based on a copy of the existing Portal User role and specify the proper access rights to some of the forms.

Configuration Overview

For the purposes of this activity, the following tasks have been performed:

  • The MYOB Advanced application instance with the U100 dataset preloaded and the Customer Portal application instance have been deployed in the same database.
    Tip: These instances must be deployed in the same database. This deployment is outside of the scope of this training.
  • In the U100 dataset, on the User Roles (SM201005) form of MYOB Advanced, the Portal Admin role has been assigned to the gibbs user account. The role provides full administrative privileges in the Customer Portal. The user account is associated with Kimberly Gibbs, the system administrator in the SweetLife Fruits & Jams company.

Process Overview

In this activity, you will make a copy of the Portal User role on the Access Rights by Role (SM201025) form. For the new role based on the copy, on the same form, you will modify the access rights to forms and specific entities in the system.

System Preparation

Before you start creating user roles, sign in to the Customer Portal instance with the U100 dataset preloaded as a system administrator with the following credentials:

  • Username: gibbs
  • Password: 123

Step 1: Creating Roles by Copying an Existing Role

To create the needed new roles by copying the existing Portal User role, do the following:

  1. Open the Access Rights by Role (SM201025) form.
  2. In the Role Name box of the Summary area, select Portal User.
  3. On the form toolbar, click Copy Role.
  4. In the New Role Name box of the New Role dialog box, which opens, type Customer Admin, and click Copy. The system closes the dialog box, creates a new role on the Access Rights by Role form (to which you return), and populates the new role with the settings of the role you have copied (except for the role name, for which the system inserts the new role name you entered in the dialog box).
  5. In the Role Description box, change the description to Customer administrator.
  6. On the form toolbar, click Save.
  7. On the form toolbar, click Copy Role.
  8. In the New Role Name box of the New Role dialog box, which opens, type Customer User, and click Copy. The system closes the dialog box, creates a new role on the Access Rights by Role form (to which you return), and populates the new role with the settings of the role you have copied (except for the role name, for which the system inserts the new role name you entered in the dialog box).
  9. In the Role Description box, change the description to Customer user.
  10. On the form toolbar, click Save.

In the following step, you will change access to some of the forms to give the role fewer privileges.

Step 2: Defining the Proper Access Rights for the Customer User Role

In this step, you will make changes to the Customer User role, which you have created. On the Access Rights by Role (SM201025) form, do the following:

  1. In the Role Name box of the Summary area, select the Customer User role.
  2. In the left pane, click the Administration node (below the tenant node). The right pane displays the list of the forms available in the Administration workspace with the level of access rights the role has to each form.
  3. In the right pane, in the row with Portal Preferences in the Description column, select Revoked in the Access Rights column.
  4. On the form toolbar, click Save.
  5. In the left pane, select Profile.
  6. In the row with Company Profile in the Description column, select View Only in the Access Rights column.
  7. In the row with Contacts in the Description column, select Revoked in the Access Rights column.
  8. On the form toolbar, click Save.

You have created two new roles by copying an existing role. You have also changed the access rights of one of the new roles to some Customer Portal forms.