CA Service Management

Hello All, I wanted to share a tip with you this week regarding the use of Xtraction. Many folks seem to be implmenting the Xtraction Dashboard and Reporting Tool (which can be purchased through CA for several Service Management Products), and some questions regarding how to set permissions to certain folders and dashboards within Xtraction, so I wanted to address that here to share it with everyone.

In Xtraction, you have the ability to create private and shared folders. Private folders can only be seen by the user who created them, and thus can only be used by that user. Shared folders however, can be set up to be viewed by specific individuals or groups. In fact, in Xtraction, that is the sole purpose of groups. Groups in Xtraction are used specifically to organize users into groups and then give specific folder permissons (to shared folders) to those groups. This allows you to easily manager which groups of users you want to have access to which shared objects (Dashboards, Reports and Documents) in Xtraction.

So here is how this works:

1. Create a folder in Xtraction and set it to be a shared folder
2. then create a group, and add the appropriate users to that group in Xtraction
3. now go back to edit the folder you created, and give the appropraite group permissions on that shared folder

You can now do the same and create different folders for different departments, and then put the dashboards created specifically for those different departments into their shared folder and then grant access to a group that has memebers who are in that department, thus blocking other users in other departments from being able to access that folder.

Please keep in mind that groups in Xtraction are NOT related to groups in Service Desk (or other service management product) and thus they are not created automatically and do not coincide with each other. You need to manually create the groups that you need in Xtraction, and manually add the appropriate users to those groups.

If you are not familiar with Xtraction and would like to learn more about it, please see the Xtraction for CA Service Management Products site here:
http://www.ca.com/us/products/detail/xTraction.aspx

Thanks and have a great week!

Jon Israel
Principal Support Engineer
CA Technologies

Thanks for all the great information Jon!

Jon_Israel wrote:

Hello All, I wanted to share a tip with you this week regarding the use of Xtraction. Many folks seem to be implmenting the Xtraction Dashboard and Reporting Tool (which can be purchased through CA for several Service Management Products), and some questions regarding how to set permissions to certain folders and dashboards within Xtraction, so I wanted to address that here to share it with everyone.

In Xtraction, you have the ability to create private and shared folders. Private folders can only be seen by the user who created them, and thus can only be used by that user. Shared folders however, can be set up to be viewed by specific individuals or groups. In fact, in Xtraction, that is the sole purpose of groups. Groups in Xtraction are used specifically to organize users into groups and then give specific folder permissons (to shared folders) to those groups. This allows you to easily manager which groups of users you want to have access to which shared objects (Dashboards, Reports and Documents) in Xtraction.

So here is how this works:

1. Create a folder in Xtraction and set it to be a shared folder
2. then create a group, and add the appropriate users to that group in Xtraction
3. now go back to edit the folder you created, and give the appropraite group permissions on that shared folder

You can now do the same and create different folders for different departments, and then put the dashboards created specifically for those different departments into their shared folder and then grant access to a group that has memebers who are in that department, thus blocking other users in other departments from being able to access that folder.

Please keep in mind that groups in Xtraction are NOT related to groups in Service Desk (or other service management product) and thus they are not created automatically and do not coincide with each other. You need to manually create the groups that you need in Xtraction, and manually add the appropriate users to those groups.

If you are not familiar with Xtraction and would like to learn more about it, please see the Xtraction for CA Service Management Products site here:
http://www.ca.com/us/products/detail/xTraction.aspx

Thanks and have a great week!

Jon Israel
Principal Support Engineer
CA Technologies

Jon,

Do the users who are placed into the group need to have 'Designer' access in order to save reports into the newly created group folder as well as viewing other reports in that folder?

Thanks!

Hi Jennifer – I took a look at some docs that I have, and what it looks like is that you need designer access in order to create/update any dashboards/reports/documents in any folder. Viewer roles do not allow creating or editing at all. With that, there are a few designer roles that have different functions. The Enterprise Designer role can edit/create anything, in any folder. The Designer role can edit/create only in folders in which they have access to…and Lastly the Private Designer can only edit/save in their own user folder but not in any other folder.

SO in summary, I think you would need the “Designer” role for the folks that you want to allow editing and creating of objects in the group folders for which they have access to.

Hope this helps ☺

Jon Israel
Principal Support Engineer
CA Technologies