There has been many post on the subject related to permission lately, and I want to show a hidden ‘gem’ in the admin panel of Claromentis Document Management which is going to help us monitor and manage permission better.
Complex Permission System
Claromentis Document Management System has comprehensive permission system, which means you can define permission by extranet area, role, group down to individual users. The permission can also inherited from the folder above as well as applied on the individual file itself.
Access Report
When you logging in to the system of course you can only see the document that you are allowed to see, but as you know from admin you can see all files.
As a document administrator you may be asked by your manager to create a report showing what a particular user can see or not see on the system.
They might be a business partners or contractors, while you want to make sure they have access to the information they need, you want to make sure there is no permission leak. You don’t want the corporate sensitive information exposed to this type of users.
What’s new in Claromentis
We created a new functionality called “Document Permission Report” and it is available from admin panel from Claromentis 5.6.3 onwards.
Under utilities in Document Panel click on “Document Permission Report”
Where you can select a user and get the permission report instantly, you can also export it to CSV format.
Screenshot
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As everything is about collaboration, and everything can be moderated – why don’t content editors give edit permissions to their own content more freely?
Everyone is keen to provide view rights, but protective of edit rights, even though this is precisely where new information would come from. Although in certain areas – like corporate policies and procedures for example – this would obviously not be appropriate - for many functions and processes increased contribution to knowledge should be welcome, even if it needs editing before approval.
Cultural openness is hard to achieve – even in collaboration platforms designed for exactly that purpose.
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Process orientated companies, as opposed to departmentally divided ones – will often place little emphasis on job titles and much more on general expertise. They expect a persons contribution to be based on their knowledge sets, but to take place in whichever process most needs them.
When we set up Intranet permissions in new intranet projects the default is usually to base at least one permission set – normally ‘Groups’ – on the departmental structures, and use ‘Roles’ to reflect much more the nature of the persons job – such as ‘manager’ or ‘administrator’ – thus allowing easy collaboration by roles across departments, as well as within them.
Since Claromentis can localize the names of permission sets, perhaps we should offer a set of permission structures that are more process-orientated. For many companies this would not be too hard to think about – ‘role’ can be the expertise area, particularly as each ‘expertise area’ can be defined as having multiple skills, and users can provide information on how they rank for all these skill sets.
Groups could then be ‘Processes’ – or however the company prefers to name them. A user could therefore be assigned to the ‘Product Development’ process but have core ‘Engineer’ expertise, with rankings for the various skills that company Engineers might have.
This would make searching for staff to contribute to a new process, or one that was struggling with workload, simple - as Claromentis already allows searching for any combination of skills within users of a particular role.
In common with career development in process orientated companies, users can also have multiple roles, allowing them to gain practical experience by working in different processes over time.
For some companies making such a change at the same time as deploying a new intranet and collaboration platform might be too much to absorb – but for others that have been considering becoming more process orientated the implementation of these ideas might be facilitated by a platform that is naturally organized along process based lines
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Those of us that go back a few years will doubtless recognize the culturally positive approach in many companies to openly acknowledge mistakes by a friendly, open “pranny of the week award” - or something similar.
These are normally awarded during some kind of Friday beer bust, and predictably seem to always go to any senior manager on hand, who always deserve it, or the marvelous vivacious girl in admin that everyone loves and obviously a long way from being a twit…
We were at an intranet project kick off meeting today with a new client and they have a great idea – once a month the pass around a toy duck that the recipient for the silly mistake of that month then has to have on their desk for the duration. A physical recognition of a daft moment that doubtless is delivered in a humorous and positive way.
In delivering collaboration platforms that increasingly look to promote interaction through tools like micro-blogging I have been interested as to how some basic concepts do or do not translate from real physical collaboration and interaction to their virtual equivalents – and “pranny of the month” might well be one of them!
I cannot imagine that any Claromentis client will look for a place on the intranet to actually promote the person in the company that made a mistake. How ridiculous that would be! The cultural wrapping, the openness, and the humor would of course all be lost – destroying the whole point of the concept.
What concerns me is how the lack of real physical interaction might sometimes lead to a serious misinterpretation of a shout/ post/corporate tweet or whatever approach is used in corporate web 2.0. Some things clearly don’t make the migration to the virtual world of the intranet at all – more worryingly perhaps there is a middle ground where we really have to be careful about our interpretation of pithy, succinct comments without the emotional framing that real life gives us.
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