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Perspectives for Security Groups

Perspectives can be integrated with User Security, allowing administrators and librarians to define the set of Perspectives available to a given security user group. This ensures that users in the group have all the tools and languages they need, whilst helping them focus on their work by completely hiding any irrelevant tools that might otherwise be distracting. This results in productivity gains, while still allowing the modelers to switch between Perspectives that have been assigned to them. So, for example, a security group called Strategic Process Modelers could be defined and an administrator could assign to it the entire Strategy Perspective set and the Decision Modeling Perspective from the Requirement set. All users assigned to this group would have access to, and be able to switch between, the individual Perspectives or, by selecting All, would be able to access the technologies in all their Perspectives. Users who have been assigned as members of a number of groups will have available to them the amalgam (union) of all their groups' Perspectives.

An administrator or librarian who has defined fine-grained technologies using the strict and restricted feature can apply these restricted Perspectives to any group, thus ensuring that the members of the group have only the restricted set of elements, connectors and diagrams from the specified technology. For example, there might be a group of strategic modelers who just need to model straight-through processing. They only need access to the basic BPMN modeling palette such as Activities and Control Flows, and are not concerned about Pools, Lanes, Gateways and Message Flows, for example, and certainly don't want to see Choreography diagrams. The librarian could set up a Strict Perspective restricted to just these modeling elements and connectors and diagrams. They then apply it to the group Strategic Process Modelers and ensure the users are made part of that group using the 'Security Users' dialog, available from the 'Configure' ribbon. This gives an administrator fine grained control of what parts of the language their project team can use, resulting in boosts in productivity and outputs.

Similarly, the model administrator can construct tailored ribbons, and assign these to specific user security groups, as a Ribbon Set for each group, so that particular ribbons can be hidden to further customize and focus the modelers' workspace.

It is important to note that the 'hidden' technologies are not disabled - the model is still logically correct and fully supported for every underlying technology; it is simply that a particular security group will not be able to model using the hidden technologies.

This feature is available in the Corporate, Unified and Ultimate Editions of Enterprise Architect, from Release 15.0.

Access

Ribbon

Start > All Windows > Perspective > Settings > Security Enforced

On the 'Perspective Sets' screen, The 'Perspective Settings for Security Groups' panel displays, listing the existing security groups for which Perspective Sets have been defined. (Existing security groups that do not have a Perspective Setting will show in the list if the 'Hide Unconfigured' checkbox is deselected.)

Notice that in the 'Perspective Set' column against the security group 'Authors' the value 'Authors' indicates the Perspective Setting that exists for that group.

At the top of the list is the group '<Model Default>', which enables you to refine the Perspectives and ribbons available to all users of this model - it is effectively an 'all model users' security group.

Assign a Perspective Setting to a Security Group

  1. Click on the required Security Group name, then click on the icon on the right of the field in the 'Perspective Set' column. The Perspective Sets available from the 'Shared Sets' are displayed in a drop-down list.
  2. Select a Perspective Set from the list, to assign it to the Security Group.
  3. You can repeat the process for another user security group.

To clear an assigned perspective setting for a group, click on the icon and select the menu option 'Reset to default'.

Assign a Ribbon Set to a Security Group

This process is similar to that for creating a Perspective Setting for a security group.

  1. Click on the required Security Group name, then click on the icon on the right of the field in the 'Ribbon Set' column. The Ribbon Sets available from the 'Shared Sets' are displayed in a drop-down list.
  2. Select a Ribbon Set from the list, to assign it to the Security Group.
  3. You can repeat the process for another user security group.

To clear an assigned ribbon set for a group, click on the icon and select the menu option 'Reset to default'.

Notes

  • The settings can only be edited by members of the security group 'Administrators', and optionally by members of the group specified in the field 'Access Locked to:'
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