Friday, January 27, 2012

Why care about User Classes?

With recent version of Dynamics GP, the user security model shifted away from user classes to security roles, tasks, and operations.  So, I am often asked why worry about user classes now? 


Microsoft Dynamics GP-Tools-Setup-System-User Classes
Users are assigned to a class in Setup-System-Users

Well, user classes still have a number of benefits in Dynamics GP.  I thought I would take you through some of them.
  1. You can assign shortcuts to an entire user class.  Simply log in to Dynamics GP as 'sa', and you will see on your navigation pane a folder for each user class.  Add a shortcut in to one of those folders, and it will appear on the navigation pane for all users that belong to the class.
  2. If you are using Account Level Security/Organizational Structures, you can assign an entire class to a branch of the organization structure, Cards-System-Organizational Tree.  This is especially useful when users are added to Dynamics GP, you can place them in to the correct class and they will automatically receive the associated account level security rather than having to assign their user individually to the organizational structure.
  3. If you use project accounting, you can restrict access to certain processes and activities in project accounting by user class.  Microsoft Dynamics GP-Tools-Setup-Project-User Classes.  You can control things like being able to change project status, change the billing type of a line item, or add a budget line item "on the fly" from a transaction.
Please feel free to share your own continued uses for User Classes.  These functions may not be important on all implementations, but in some cases User Classes can still be very helpful!

Christina Phillips is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional. She is a supervising consultant with BKD Technologies, providing training, support, and project management services to new and existing Microsoft Dynamics customers. This blog represents her views only, not those of her employer.

3 comments:

Jen Kuntz said...

Hi Christina,

Great post! This subject just came up on a forum post.

A couple other uses for User Class I've got on my list are:

- Field Level Security is still assigned by user or user class
- Smartlist favourites "visible to" User Class still is one of the options.

I'm sure there are others!

Jen

Christina Phillips said...

Totally right! I forgot about SmartList favorites and Field Level Security, more reasons to not throw out user classes entirely...yet :)

Jen Kuntz said...

Found another one :)

Smartlist Builder's Restrictions feature, you can apply restrictions to certain users or user classes only.

Apparently user classes will never die.....