Deprecate Wiki Access Rights to simplify things

  • 28 December 2021
  • 5 replies
  • 224 views

Userlevel 2

Dear partners and customers,

We need your feedback on whether this suggestion makes sense to you.

 

Currently, we have very flexible management of access rights for Wiki pages:

 

We have an assumption that there is no real need to configure access to Wiki pages with this level of granularity. We observed a number of support cases where a Wiki page was not accessible to some users/roles due to misconfiguration. Typically, Wiki pages don’t contain any sensitive information that should be hidden from somebody in the system.

​So, we’d like to consider deprecating access rights management for Wiki pages, thus making them available to all users in the system by default.

I’ve also created an Idea to vote for but decided to discuss it here as well to get your opinions faster.

 

Any feedback would be much appreciated.


5 replies

Userlevel 7
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Thank you @vpanchenko for reaching out to the community for feedback! Everyone please share your opinions here :relaxed:

Userlevel 3
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At my company we’ve never had cause to restrict wiki content at all.  In the end it is all just information used to understand the system and clarify specific fields and such.  

As an aside, the typo in this section actually made me laugh: “Wiki pages don’t contain any sensible information”.  I’ve had coworkers tell me how terse the wiki can be at times. I know this was meant to be “sensitive” but please do not encourage them!  :grinning:

Userlevel 7
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LOL @PorchlightZach - Thanks for the grammar catch! As @vpanchenko is currently out for the holidays, I have corrected it for him. 

Userlevel 4
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Hi Panchenko,

Thanks for publishing your survey. Wiki is a feature that is or will become a key resource for some Acumatica partners. Let me explain this point please.

If you have an Acumatica instance dedicated to serve your company , it is very likely that most of the information stored in Wiki pages might be accessible to all employees. This is most of the cases where Acumatica is used by a small company and no confidential info is distributed via Wiki. Honestly , Wiki is not largely used in small and medium companies as this is an additional administrative burden to small IT groups and most of the time when they get Acumatica they already have a solution for sharing documents. But I can think of the cases where we do need a way to manage who has access to a Wiki page or folder:

  1. Documents, procedures, instructions and reports that should be restricted to a specific department and/or function level. You may think that in this case those documents may be stored in intranet, extranet, Sharepoint or cloud solutions. But that would this would require more resources and more work to manage multiple document solutions.
  2. Documents , procedures instructions and reports for contractors and partners that have access to your Acumatica instance. In this case, you need to publish a specific set of pages to individual partner/contractor. 
  3. We use Acumatica Portal with Case management to support customers/suppliers and we use Wiki pages dedicated to each customer . If we do not have a way to control the access to those pages then the use of the Portal will be reduced to checking the cases or invoices which is OK but the advantages of a good communication through Wiki will be lost. 

If you remove the management of access rights for Wiki pages, what methods would you propose to accomplish the use of Wiki for the cases mentioned above ?

Also, the volume of information in the built-in wiki is too much for most of Acumatica users. So, instead of leaving all  available or removing Wiki pages, access rights can be used to focus the result of searches to what is relevant to a group of users according to their activities. 

In my experience with Wiki pages, the limitations and the cumbersome syntax of the Editing tool is really discouraging.   Maybe this is what makes Wiki articles not as popular as it should be. 

Userlevel 5
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I use the Wikis as part of training so user know where to find the how to information.  Having open access to the standard wiki is a good idea.  As a former ISV who had to create and maintain our product’s wiki, having to fix access rights was a waste of time. So you need to extend the open access to all ISV wikis but you could make this an option on the Wiki for those clients who wish restrict access.

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