Ok, so imagine a bank has a call-centre filled with low-trust staff. The staff need to provide basic service to customers over the phone. The call centre staff take calls from a customer, ask them certain security questions, and then service the accounts in some way.
Now, from the customer's point of view, the bank is verifying who they are by asking the security questions. This is subtly different from the bank's point of view: It is verifying that the call centre employee is talking to the customer.
Why is this difference important? The bank wants to restrict these low trust staff, so they cannot view any details of the accounts until the customer calls them. So a call centre employee can't browse account details of customers that haven't just contacted him and asked for service.
So the question is:
Is this sort of setup possible in Dynamics CRM 2011? How would one go about implementing it? Some level of customization would be OK, but a bespoke application driven from the CRM data is not.
I'm thinking that maybe it's possible to create a custom component that temporarily modifies the user's permissions to a record (and all its children) after answering some security questions. However, I'm not even sure that record-based security (beyond Ownership) is supported in CRM...? I guess one could temporarily assign ownership to the user. Is that wise?
Please note: Simply hiding views & find buttons from the GUI isn't the sort of level of security we're looking for here. We're looking to literally restrict the user from accesing the records in question.
I can see a couple of options:
Working within the permissions model. This could work. You could have access restricted by default, and then have another entity where you'd enter in the account details, a plugin would run and verify the details, and then share the record to the current user. I'd be a little concerned, however, on how the unsharing would work. What would trigger it? Would there be a process that just runs outside of CRM and unshares records periodically. What if that process fails? We've also had performance issues in the past with this type of model... CRM seems to do a lot of work under the hood every time an individual record's permissions are changed like this.
Reassigning the owner, as you suggest. Would multiple users ever need to look at the same data? Does the owner of the record need to be maintained for any other reason (e.g. This is Joe's account because he's the owner).
Working exclusively with plugins. You could have a plugin registered on Retrieve and RetrieveMultiple of a record. This plugin could filter out all the details you want to hide from the end user. When the user needs to view the rest of the data, they fill out a form or dialog or something with the data. This data is then included in the Retrieve call for the record. The plugin checks for the hidden data, verifies that it's there and correct, then strips it out and lets the request continue, only this time it retrieves all attributes, and the form populates as expected.
Disclaimer: this answer is based on plenty of CRM 4.0 experience and reading the release notes for 2011.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: yes, but the customisation would be major. The 'easiest' option that springs to mind, is that the authentication process is carried out as a bespoke asp.net page that either a) uses a service account to re-assign an entity to an individual and then returns them to the relevant CRM form, then a plug in that re-assigns it back on saving changes
or
b) has it's own set of forms to that update and retrieve information as a service account, and only do so after answering the security questions.
As an aside, any kind of 'scripted' form is almost impossible in CRM 4.0. I believe 2011 slightly improves on that, but what I've seen is still not encouraging. Using CRM in a contact centre for us has meant investing in a piece of third party form building software and creating bespoke forms that can be launched from CRM and return data via the web services (which are impressively flexible). We only use the CRM interface for viewing historic requests - even most updates trigger one of the bespoke forms.
If I was to implement such a scenario I would create a customer access record (new_custaccess) that is linked to the customer record (new_customer). For this example - keeping it simple - I'm going to assume that the customer has a simple access code they must provide before the bank employee (Operator) can access the record. The access code is stored on new_custaccess in a field (new_secretcode).
Security is that the Operator has no privileges to new_customer and read/update privileges to new_custaccess.
There is a single field (new_secretcodeoperator) on new_custaccess that the operator can update. All other fields are restricted from update (and, if appropriate, read) to the Operator.
When the Customer calls and the Operator searches for the appropriate new_custaccess record. Once they locate the record they enter the Customer provided secret code into the field new_secretcode and do a save.
A Pre-Update query executes on new_custaccess in the context of a user with full privileges (call it MASTER, for fun here.) That plug-in checks to see if the provided code matches the secret code. If it doesn't it throws an error and the Operator can retry. If it does match the plug-in strips the field new_secretcodeoperator from the record, to keep it from saving the value. It also shares appropriate permission on the record new_customer to the appropriate operator.
The Operator now has access to the Customer record (you'll have to decide whether to cascade permissions or share on each record - that decision is beyond this discussion.)
We now need to deal with rescinding permission on the Customer record. I would handle this by having an entity new_customeraccess that is generated by the previous plug-in whenever access is granted to a Customer record. A workflow should be triggered on Create of new_customeraccess that cause new_customeraccess to be updated every 20 minutes (or whatever time the client prefers.)
A plugin is registered on Update of new_customeraccess that fires when the field updated by the workflow is modified. This plug-in will determine - via whatever criteria is decided on by the business - whether to continue sharing or revoke sharing.
I would also create some javascript/html based pop-up from the new_customer ribbon to end sharing by updating a field on new_customeraccess. Provide the Operator with limited Update privs on new_customeraccess via field level security.
This should accomplish what you want without going outside the standard CRM customization model. Not exactly sure of where you draw the line on bespoke but this is probably as close as you'll get to OOTB. A few plug-ins are all the C# you'll need. And the only JavaScript will be for usability, not functionality.
Let me know if you have questions.
Related
Is there any way to login other users account for admin user ?
Currently authentication based on Meteor Accounts
I saw this post but didn't working at all now.
The feature is important for us because when user have problem in system then admin need to see it this by simulating user account.
Thanks in advance.
It seems you want to impersonate a user. This means that you want to have Meteor.userId (or this.userId depending on context) reflect the _id of a specific user both on the client and the server.
afaict the only way to do this is to login as the user. Presumably you don't want to ask the user for their password so you have a couple of choices:
Save their existing password, replace it (temporarily) with a password of your choosing, then after you're done impersonating their account, restore their existing password.
You probably don't want to ask the user for their password and you don't need to. All you need to do is set aside Meteor.user.findOne(userId).services.password.bcrypt, then reset the password to your temporary value, then restore the original bcrypt value later.
The downside is that the original user would not be able to login while you are logged-in. Plus it's really hacky.
Extend Meteor's Accounts package to provide impersonation capability in a more elegant manner.
You might also look at validateLoginAttempt. The docs are unclear as to whether a failed login attempt could be overridden with a successful one but if it could then that would provide another pathway to solve your problem.
Instead of logging in as the users, which requires their password and which is a total no-no, you may use rather alanning:roles and allow the admin to assign the role of any user in order to draw views based the user's role.
This requires a well designed role system.
As a plus you could then at least load the documents associated with the user who you want to support.
This requires a well designed document and data model.
But generally spoken you should rather focus on writing good tests (test driven development) for components as unit tests, integration tests and UI tests.
This will reduce the need to manually view the app as an end user a lot.
The most common end user problems can be reduced by creating a good knowledge base like a wiki or video tutorials.
Even if then an error occurs in the end user side, I would rather try to implement a well designed error log that allows users automatically create tickets on error which also include the error stack.
All the above methods are to be favored before logging in AS THE USER.
As #Jankpunkt has already mentioned alanning-roles I can add something you can use without installing any external package.
Just keep a type key in the profile object of the users collection. Then define some types like 1 for super-admin, 2 for admin, 3 for general etc. Then check the authorisation of particular action by checking the value of user.profile.type key.
Caveats: Make sure you are checking the type in server side. By default profile field is writable from the client end, so if you are putting type field in the profile object make sure that you are not allowing users to modify users collection in the client end.
Here is how to restrict client end update in users collection:
Meteor.users.deny({
update() { return true; }
});
Read more on roles and permissions here:
https://guide.meteor.com/accounts.html#roles-and-permissions
We are trying to integrate our platform with Pipedrive. As far as we have researched, in a pipedrive account, there is one admin and he can add multiple users. And the users later can login in their respective accounts.
What we are trying to make sure is that once a Pipedrive account is integrated with our platform, the same account should not be integrated twice. So, I need a unique identifier, that lets me know whether the account has already been integrated.
My initial approach was to check the api key. But it was not successful, since every users in an account have different API Keys.
After a bit of research, I found out that there is an identifier called company_id which is common for all the users in an account. But I could not find anything regarding it in documentation. So, I am not 100% confident to go ahead and implement it in our code.
Does anyone have an idea about this?
Pipedrive support rep here.
The most sure-fire way to ensure this is to make a GET request against http://api.pipedrive.com/v1/users?api_token=your_token_here.
You are correct in assuming the company_id in the additional_data object in the response is static and won't change across any users on the account.
Note that a Pipedrive account may have more than one admin, and that non-admins (regular users) might have visibility (and editing) restrictions in place, which may cause some of your GET, PUT and DELETE requests to fail.
In case you're not doing this already, I'd thus advise filtering the data array from the abovementioned endpoint for user.is_you to equal true and check whether the is_admin property is set to 1 during "registration" to ensure the user setting up the integration is an admin.
Hope this helps!
I'm not quite sure what you're asking for. Are you looking for a unique identifier for each user?
Each user has an id, you can get all users by calling
https://api.pipedrive.com/v1/users?api_token=____
This will return a JSON Object with data on your users, including their names and associated IDs. Admins are just users with different privilege levels. All admins are users, but not all users are admins. All users are part of a company, the company is identified by the first part of the Pipedrive account url ie.
https://FooCompany.pipedrive.com
Are you trying to see if a certain company has been integrated already?
I'm seeking for the solution or suggestion, to find out that did this function is able to work in CRM 2016.
"User A" is opening an (account record form A), in the moment the "User A" is trying to open the another (account record form B) while the previous account record form still haven't close.
Here the requirement from my client.
The (account record form B) is unable to open while there is existing (account record form A) is opened up.
That means the User is only can open the Account record form once at a same time.
I am appreciate if anyone can leave a comment.
Thanks in advance.
This is not possible not only in Dynamics CRM, but also in any Web Application or website out there. This is technically not possible, because user can always open a different browser or browser in private mode and you will not be able to control that (unless you deploy some malware software on all users computer, but this is clearily not a Dynamics CRM customizations thing)
Pawel makes a good point about web apps in general.
Because we have the plugin model and JavaScript in CRM, there is a hypothetical possibility of building something for this - though it pushes the boundaries of abuse of the CRM extension model.
The idea would be something like this:
Create an external table to maintain a list of open Account forms by user.
Register a plugin on the retrieve message of the Account. When the user retrieves an account, populate an entry into the table.
If the user attempts to retrieve another Account, check the table. If they have an open Account form, prevent the retrieve.
Create JavaScript on the Account form to remove the entry in the external table when the user closes the Account form.
If this could even work, it would be a complex, fragile solution that would likely also harm performance.
Unless you want to share the reason why you want only one Account open at a time so we can discuss alternative options, I'd recommend letting this one go.
I am working on designing an approval system in CRM and need some inputs on the security design. The entity I am using has User/Team level R/W rights. The overall implementation is bit complex but to keep this question simple, consider the following two parties involved in the system:
Requester: Needs R/W access on requests created by him.
Approver Team: These are pre-defined teams whose users will approve/reject the request. Needs R/W access on requests which need their approval.
Question:
How can I handle providing R/W access for both - Requester and Approver Team at the same time? Since we can't have multiple owners of a record in CRM, the Owner field can only contain either of them (Requester or Approver Team) at one time.
I can think of two solutions to this using sharing functionality and wanted to confirm my understanding:
a. Set Requester as the record Owner and share the record with Approver Team programmatically. The problem with this approach is that even if I share the record with Approver Team, I won't be able to show the sharing details on the main form (which is a requirement).
b. Set Approver Team as the record Owner and programmatically share the record with Requester using Access Templates.
Is there any better solution to handle this requirement, in case I am missing any OOB possibilities?
Well I believe that you can make solution A working with a little bit of coding (I'm not sure if you don't mind coding, but we are on StackOverflow, so I think you should consider that).
First of all the design depends on the simple question - should this Request be shared with multiple teams, or only single team? Single team is simple - just add a lookup on the Request, that will point to a Team. When this team is filled in (I'm assuming that choice of this team is done somehow automatically, but it does not matter as in any scenario you would have to choose the team anyway somehow), you run a simple plugin that shares the record for this team. Sharing using SDK is really simple, just use the GrantAccessRequest:
var grantAccessRequest = new GrantAccessRequest
{
PrincipalAccess = new PrincipalAccess
{
AccessMask = AccessRights.ReadAccess | AccessRights.WriteAccess,
Principal = teamEntityReference
},
Target = requestReference
};
So on the form of the request you will keep the owner of the Request and will have a lookup pointing to a Team that is handling this request. Of course you can further pimp it up by for example un-sharing when the request is accepted or declined or the lookup on the request is changed etc. That would keep the POA table more happy as sharing huge amount of records can lead to fast grow of that table, so it's important to unshare records if sharing no longer needed.
If you want to share to multiple teams, you can still create a N:N relationship between your Request and Team and simply share your Request in a plugin on Associate message between Request and Team (this was a standard option before Access Teams were introduced for the users, remains still the only option for teams). This relationship can be show as a subgrid on Request form (it would look like an access team subgrid).
Of course to prevent users from Sharing the Request record on their own (in that case you will not have the Team in your lookup/subgrid) they should not have Sharing privilege. The plugin should do the sharing in admin context.
UPDATE:
As for the POA considerations from the comments: both solutions will make your POA grow, because for both solutions you will have to share the Request either with the team or with the user. If you will use access team you will still have one POA entry for each Request (so 100K entries per year). I believe that the most important thing here is what happens with the Request when it ends it's lifecycle. If it does not have to be visible to the Team, after it was accepted/rejected then you should simply have a mechanism (plugin or some custom app running on some timely manner) that would unshare all the Requests that no longer require sharing, keeping your POA table in reasonable size.
There is another way of handling your scenario that would not require that much sharing/unsharing logic. You can create a "Request Acceptation" entity in 1:N parental relationship with Request. Because it's parental relationship, user owning Request will see all the "Request Acceptation" and "Request Acceptation" will be owned by proper Team (so only this team will have access). Of course I don't know anything about the business logic, but I assume that "Request Acceptation" can contain only the information relevant to the Team which can be copied in a plugin or workflow.
UPDATE2: As I just saw that you cannot unshare the record at a later stage. But I'm assuming that at some point of time Request is done/accepted/finished/rejected or whatever. If at this point both Teams and User should have access to this Request, then maybe it's a good thing to create some kind of separate entity "Archived Requests", that would not be shared, simply cloned for all the principals that are interested in seeing this information and deleting original Request. There are many variations of this idea, I hope that you get it and can adapt it accordingly to your scenario
Your option a makes the most sense: Requester being the creator, should own the Request. Approver just acts on the Request, so it should be shared with.
About showing sharing details, you can put a subgrid in the form: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-customer-center/create-a-team-template-and-add-to-an-entity-form.aspx
Add a team template to the entity form
Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or
equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Check your security role
[read more in the linked page]
Since Requester is a USER an Approver is a TEAM, OOB you can only do option b (assign to the team, share with the user via Access Team).
I can't think of any clean solution involving enumerating the team members and act on each of them, so I won't suggest it.
I am using vaadin 7, and jboss 7.1.1. There is a business requirement for very granular ui access. There will be parent windows per business function, and in that window functions relative to it. Business requires enabling and disabling those functions within, per user, so as an example, a parent window that represents employees, and when you click that you enter the child window which has functions like editing, deleting, viewing, adding,etc etc but that access must be customized to the user using it, so user x can update but not delete, as an example.
So what i came up with was to store that information in the database. In the database there will be a users table with username and a user guid. Then a parentview table and and parentchildren table and then lastly a userview table. i will store in the userview table the users guid and either the view they have access to and what type of access as in read,write,update,etc... I will on the ui login authenticate against ldap, get the users information and guid and use the guid to pull the users view access from the userview table in the database and store it in the vaadin session, and then on the ui, read that from the session and show the correct access.
I am not sure if this is the best way which is why i am asking if my solution is ok? I have been reading lots of doc's around security but non seem to achieve what i want. Another point of keeping it in the db, is that i can create a user admin ui which can edit the users access simply by updating the db, i dont want to redeploy or do anything with the webserver, I would prefer a ui user access control module and for someone with rights to it to administer that access. I would really appreciate insight and some ideas into this.
Thanks guys, I would appreciate any input.
What you want to achieve, regardless of the environment you are in and technology you are using, is fine-grained access control / authorization.
The way to do that is to use authorization frameworks. Spring Security has one for instance. I'm not sure whether Vaadin comes with anything.
In our company we use Vaadin to develop a management portal and we then use XACML to apply fine-grained decisions to the portal such as which functions to enable for which users and even which items to display in a Vaadin table.
Generally speaking you want to look at the field of attribute-based access control (NIST ABAC). ABAC lets you define authorization constraints based on different factors/parameters such as user attributes (location, department, role...) and resource attributes (where the resource can be data, widgets, functions... You name it).
I actually delivered a webinar yesterday on the topic of fine-grained authorization for Java MVC apps. I think it could prove useful for you.
If you go down the XACML path, you do not need to create a custom database with the information inside as you have done. All you need to do is write authorization policies e.g. a user in purchasing can use the purchasing functions.
There are several open source XACML implementations as well as vendor solutions such as the one I work for, Axiomatics.
I hope this helps. I've also written a lengthier answer here which covers the broader field of authorization.