Amy O’Neel hosted an interesting session yesterday during our Let’s Speak BO webinar series on Security Lessons in BusinessObjects. The session focused on Explicit Settings based upon User Inheritance; an important and overlooked feature available in BusinessObjects, demonstrating customizable options for user restrictions in the BI Launchpad.

You can stream Amy's webinar right here.

This feature sparked a lot of interest throughout the webinar, seeing that it enables the administrator to set up an automatic retrieval of secondary access rights per user in order to bypass a “declined notification” to the user based upon individual access restrictions. Amy O’Neel, BusinessObjects Administration expert, did a nice job of explaining this important BusinessObjects security concept by demonstrating and discussing the permissions by hierarchy, and how one rule can be overwritten by another rule due to the permission settings.

Attendees also seemed to be intrigued by the differences in features that have been enhanced and/or removed due to version upgrades. Because of these version-based questions during the webinar, Amy took the audience through a deeper look at the BO security options by version from XI 3.1 to BI 4.x and some of the significant changes made by BusinessObjects to the BI Launchpad. Amy discussed how higher versions had removed certain features all together; features like “drill mode” for the administrator when viewing user access rights and the interactive feature of hiding or showing toolbars.

Some of the good changes in 4.x that Amy also touched on were some of the enhancements to the administrators experience by the renaming of certain settings that enable better navigation for custom security set up in the BO environment.

Amy will be hosting a part two to this webinar presentation on BusinessObjects security at IBIS 2018 where she will take the Top 10 Case Studies based upon customer experiences, how the security issues or requirements were resolved, and more importantly the valuable lessons learned in each security scenario.