Once you have conceptualized and named your security groups and created them in the Database Configuration tool, it’s time to apply them to your userbase, and apply them consistently. Here is a Crystal Report that you can use to see users organized by security group and department. It’s a useful tool for being able to compare users and their permissions as you begin to right-sizing their security profiles. (more…)
Blog
-
Naming Convention for Security Groups
Setting up appropriate security groups for your TMS instance is an important, and often overlooked, function of the system administrator. I have heard of many institutions that operate TMS using only the default groups, meaning that every user has system administrator privileges. Setting up security groups is more tedium than anything else; but requires two pre-requisites: conceptualizing your security groups and settling on a naming convention.
(more…) -
Standardizing your Constituent Phone Numbers
Did you ever notice that American and Canadian phone numbers are both prefaced with the international calling code of “1”? This is because twenty countries, primarily in North America and the Caribbean, participate in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). Let’s examine how these numbers are structured, establish standards for data entry and then apply those standards to our existing records.
(more…) -
Highlight Alternate Rows in Crystal Reports
I’m sure there are many of us who remember the green bar continuous form paper that spewed out of the old dot matrix printers. The horizontal green bar assisted the reader with following a line of text across the page. Often a horizontal line is used in Crystal Reports for the same purpose. But there are times that I find that these lines just add more black ink to the page – and that instead of making it easier to read, actually make it harder. Instead, I’m going to use a background color to highlight alternate rows, and create a differentiation between my records.
(more…) -
Putting the Umbrella Away
I like a nice clean user interface, unencumbered by extraneous options. I also like to restrict access to modules and fieldsets that our institution isn’t currently using, as a way of preventing “rogue” data entry. The Insurance Policy module is one such example, with our blanket policy there is no need for tracking this in the database. And even if we did, there would only be a handful of users that would need access to this information. So I’m going to modify my security profiles to restrict access to this module. (more…)