User Reviewer V2: Sneak Peek

If you’re a SAS platform administrator who manages a SAS metadata security implementation then you might be interested in this sneak peek of some of the enhancements in the next version of our Metacoda Security Plug-ins (custom plug-ins that can be installed into the SAS Management Console). We’ve been hard at work updating our plug-ins to provide enhanced views of the great new metadata security improvements in SAS® 9.2 like roles and capabilities.

Roles and capabilities in SAS 9.2 let you control, via the SAS metadata server, user access to functionality and features in SAS client applications such as SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Add-in to Microsoft Office, SAS Web Report Studio and SAS Management Console. For an excellent overview of roles and capabilities I’d definitely recommend reading Kathy Wisniewski’s SAS Global Forum 2010 paper “Be All That You Can Be: Best Practices in Using Roles to Control Functionality in SAS® 9.2“.

We’re improving our Metacoda Security Plug-ins User Reviewer by adding Roles and Capabilities tabs that provide extended information about the roles and capabilities for a user. This screenshot (click the thumbmail to view the full size image in a new window) shows a preview of our new Roles tab:

In the screenshot you can see that I have tracked down a particular user and am looking at all of the roles he is associated with. It shows:

• direct role associations, where a user is a member of the role directly
• indirect role associations, where the user is a member of a group (possibly nested) and that group is a member of the role
• implicit role associations, where the user is associated with the role through the one of the implicit groups (SASUSERS and PUBLIC)
• contributed role associations, where the user is associated with a role indirectly through that roles contribution to another role the user is associated with

Essentially this new Roles tab allows you to answer the question: is a user associated with a particular role, and if so, by what means are they associated?

Another question administrators want to answer for a given user is what capabilities do they have or not have, and why? That’s where our new User Reviewer Capabilities tab helps. Here is another screenshot (once again click the thumbnail to enlarge):

This screenshot shows the Capabilities tab where you can see a list of all the capabilities and whether or not the user has been granted access to them. If the user has been granted access to a capability it also shows which role is providing them with the capability and the membership path from the user to the role. If you’ve ever tried to track down why a user has an unexpected capability then I’m sure you’ll appreciate how useful this is.

That’s it for this sneek peak, but if you are going to SAS Global Forum 2011 in Las Vegas this year, and you’d like to find out more, then please pop by and visit us in the SAS Alliance Cafe for a demo – we’ll be in booth #106.

BTW if anyone out there is interested in trying out a beta version then we’re looking for a few more beta testers. If you have a SAS metadata server in a development, test, or sandpit environment and would like to test drive our plug-ins then let me know. You can contact me through this blog, Twitter, my LinkedIn profile, the Metacoda web site or even in person at the SAS Global Forum in a few weeks time