Configuring access collections

If you wish, you can limit the users who can work with particular configuration items (CIs). You can activate this security function by defining access collections, which contain groups of CIs, and assigning groups of users to work with those access collections. For example, you might want administrators to work with CIs in their local area, or to work with certain types of CIs. If you do not use this function, each user that logs in to Control Desk is able to work with any CI in the applications to which that user's security groups give access. If you want to control users' access to configuration items, follow these steps.

Before you begin

Before beginning these steps, perform the procedure described in Configuring security.

You can synchronize your access collections and the security groups whose members can work with them, with the TADDM component. In this case, the same restrictions are enforced in the TADDM user interface. If you want to enable this synchronization, follow the steps in Synchronizing access collections before you create your access collections. Collections are synchronized when they are created or modified; if you create your collections before enabling synchronization, they are synchronized only if you modify them.

About this task

When you put configuration items into an access collection, only the specified users are able to:
  • View information about those CIs
  • Choose those CIs from a list to perform any action
  • Run reconciliation reports using those CIs
  • Process a change request involving those CIs

To create access collections and assign security groups to work with them, follow these steps:

Procedure

  1. Choose the groups of configuration items to which you want to control access. You can define groups in any of the ways available in the Collections application. Click Go to > IT Infrastructure > Collections to open the Collections application. If you already defined collections for other purposes, you can use them as access collections if you wish. An access collection can contain items other than configuration items, but only the configuration items are affected.
  2. Choose the groups of users who should have access to each collection. If these groups do not exist in your directory server, define them there. You can reuse the security groups that are used to control application access, or you can create new groups that overlap the existing groups.
  3. In the directory server, assign users to the newly created groups.
  4. Information about the new groups and their members are copied to the Maximo database by the VMM cron task. All control of access to configuration items is performed within Control Desk using this information.
  5. Assign security groups to work with the access collections. Follow these steps for each security group that has access to one or more collections:
    1. Click Go to > Security > Security Groups to open the Security Groups application.
    2. Choose the group whose permissions you want to define.
    3. Click the Data Restrictions tab and then the Collection Restrictions subtab.
    4. Use the New Row button to add collections to which this security group has access.
    5. After adding all the collections, click Save.

What to do next

After you complete these steps, log in to Control Desk with user IDs that should have access to some, but not all, access collections. Verify that each user ID can work with CIs from the appropriate collections and not CIs from collections to which it should not have access.


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