Business Objects Security and Advanced Rights

Dallas Marks head shot

I’m teaching BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.0/3.1: Administration and Security (course number SA210V3.1) this week. It’s the first of three classes about BusinessObjects Enterprise administration. Not just for administrators, this course is beneficial for people who want to integrate their reporting and dashboard solutions with the Business Objects security model to implement features such as row level security. Although that capability is well covered in the Universe Design course (DM310), the security topics presented in Administration and Security will provide a more robust foundation for a successful implementation.

The instructors guide sometimes contains information that for whatever reason isn’t shared in the student, or “learners” guide. One example is in Lesson 3, Securing BusinessObjects Enterprise Content.

You may wish to point students to the Rights Appendix in the BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.0/3.1 Administration Guide for further information on user rights and the effects they have on the system. This is a summary of the technical paper (boe_xi_r2_sp2_cmc_rights_descriptions_and_impact_on_applications.pdf) written for XI R2 which can be downloaded from the technical support website.

The vague term “technical support website” must be the Business Objects technical writer’s shorthand for “hey, we can’t find anything on the SAP web site either – good luck”. Fortunately, the Administration Guide and many other documents are readily (and freely) available on the SAP Help Portal. And I was able to quickly locate the other document, CMC Rights Descriptions and Their Impact on Different Applications (v1.0), using a Google search. And I’ve bookmarked them here for your future reference (mine as well).

So for those of you designing custom access levels for your XI 3.x environments, these two resource can shed a ray of light on the many granular rights that can be set. You may also want to take a look at my GBN 2008 conference presentation entitled CMC Essentials.

Dallas Marks

Dallas Marks

I am an analytics and cloud architect, author, and trainer. An AWS certified blogger, SAP Mentor Alumni and co-author of the SAP Press book SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence: The Comprehensive Guide, I prefer piano keyboards over computer keyboards when not blogging or tweeting.

3 thoughts on “Business Objects Security and Advanced Rights

  1. Hi,
    I’ve a query… When i tried to change the “Manage access restrictions” of an universe it gives me the below error:

    “Failed to Initialize access restrictions”

    Can you help me?

  2. Hey Dall,

    I am working with Business Objects XI Release 2. I am trying to fetch encrypted data from SQL Server 2008. This data is Pass Phrase encrypted. Hence I need a mechanism to pass the "pass phrase" to SQL Server. Please let me know if there is any hook in Business Objects to do the same.

    It would be great if I can prompt the user to enter the pass phrase.

    Any help would be appreciated.

    Thanks.

    – Nasha.

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