User groups

Depending on your type of solution, you will have different kinds of users associated with your Dynamicweb system.

For instance, you could have:

• Backend marketing personnel, who use the Dynamicweb Marketing tools to create and execute campaigns
• Backend administrators and editors
• Frontend private and business customers
• Frontend editors
• Etc.

All of these will be organized in user groups.

And with user groups, administration and maintenance of all your different kinds of users can be done in an easy and speedy manner, by administrators – or even by the users themselves – including the ability to assign or remove permissions to certain content or modules.

In this section you will learn about:

• Creating (and deleting) a user group
• User group setting and permissions
• Sorting and searching users in user groups

To create a user group:

• Click Users on your accordion
• Right-click the user tree structure and click New group (Figure 3.1)

Figure 3.1 Click new group to create a new user group

This opens the basic group settings (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 The basic user group settings

You must:

• Name the group
• Select users for the group by adding them individually – or by selecting a smart search in the dropdown.
• Click Save or Save and close the user group to create it

Under the Information and GeoLocation settings areas, you can provide group-specific information, but this is optional, and may or may not be useful for your groups.

Don’t forget that you can customize user group settings and permissions – read more below.

When creating or editing a user group, you have access to a number of tools from the user group ribbon (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 The user group ribbon

From the user group ribbon, you can:

• See permissions for the user group, for both frontend, backend and modules (Figure 4.2). Click on the area marked in red to change between backend and frontend permissions. This is only an overview – permissions are set on the page, module, etc. itself.

Figure 4.2 View user group permissions by clicking the user group ribbon permissions button

• Select a custom editor configuration for the user group
• Allow (or disallow) backend login for users groups, who should have access to (parts of) the administration.
• Select a custom start page for the user group
• Set or remove email permissions for the entire group (be careful with this, in most countries it is illegal to send emails to people who have not given their explicit consent).
• Click Validate to check the format of all email addresses for users within the group. A window with incorrectly formatted emails will pop up, and allow you to correct or delete the addresses. The validation runs as follows:
  • Is the email format valid?
  • Does the domain exist?
  • Does the domain have an MX (mail server) record?
• Select a number of group admins – users who can edit or add users in the user group. Group admins will have access to user management when logged into the backend, but will only be able to edit and add users to the group they are admin of, and will never be able to edit an administrator account.
• Select an item type to extend user group properties or user properties with.
• Customize impersonation settings for the user group.  (You need to save the group, before you can configure the impersonation settings.) Read about impersonation below.

To edit, delete or move a user group:

• Right-click the group on your user management tree structure (Figure 5.1).
• Click Edit, move or delete group

Figure 5.1 Right-click a user group to e.g. edit, delete or move it

From the right-click menu, you can also sort users in a user group, import and export users, and create new users and subgroups.

New users are created at the bottom of the user list.

You can sort your users temporarily and by column in ascending or descending order by clicking the arrows to the right of every user column, but if you want a specific sorting on a permanent basis, you can click sort users in the right-click menu.

This will take you to the sort users view (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 The sort users view allows you to permanently change the sorting of users in a user group

From here, simply drag and drop users to suit your needs and click save.

If you have many users, it may be useful to search them, to find individual users or users who share certain properties.

For that purpose, you have access to the user search field and filters (Figure 7.1). 

Figure 7.1 You can search and filter users within a group

The search field searches the current selection of users – if you have selected Complete list in the user management tree, you will search all users, and if you have selected a specific group or smart search, you only search users within that group or smart search.

To search for users, simply enter your search term in the search field and press enter.

You also have the option of filtering your search via the dropdown selectors.

You can filter on:

• Active and inactive users
• User with and without backend login

Note that searching users searches all fields on the users - but that you can use operators to search specific fields - although custom fields cannot be searched.

When searching users, the following operators are available to you.

Remember to use double quotes to search for values containing spaces.

Note that the “=” operator does not work as a ‘contains’ operator, but as an equal-operator. This means, that if you search for e.g. Department=Marketing, you will only find users who have the value ‘Marketing’ in the department field, and not users who have e.g. the value ‘Sales & Marketing’ in the department field.

For a full list of fields you can search, see the Database section of this documentation.

In this section you will learn about:

• The advanced management options for user management
• Allowing users to log in, and place orders, on behalf of other users (impersonation)

User management has a number of advanced configuration options associated with it, options which are relevant for both users, user groups and user management in general.

To edit these settings:

• Go to Management center > Control Panel >Modules
• Click User Management

This will bring up the advanced configuration options.

Here’s a rundown of what you can do.

With the passwords and the Password security settings, you can customize you security settings.

Figure 12.1 WIth the password and password security settings, you can control your security settings

You can:

• Encrypt all existing passwords – be advised, that the process is non-reversible
• Customize the default password security behavior for both Extranet and Administration users, where you can:
  • Check the Encrypt checkbox to enable encryption by default – in combination with the extranet module, and user initiated profile creation, this means that your users will not have to worry about their password security. If checked, you can select your preferred hashing algorithm.
  • Enable password expiration, from 30 days to a year.
  • Customize password reuse settings
  • Select the minimum required password complexity level
  • Specify the minimum number of characters a password should be

With the smart search settings (Figure 13.1), you can select how often your smart searched should be recalculated by the system.

Figure 13.1 The smart search settings allow you to control how often smart searches are recalculated

On many solutions custom fields make sense, e.g. when importing users from other systems, where critical information is not matched by one of the regular user fields.

In those scenarios, you can create custom fields to suit your purposes.

Figure 14.1 The custom and system field settings allow you to view and create custom and system fields

To do so, click Edit custom fields in the list of settings, to bring up the custom fields view (Figure 14.2).

Figure 14.2 A custom field

From here, you can add new custom fields by specifying a name, a system name and a type

System fields are a little more esoteric, and cannot be edited. They are created by the system when integrating with e.g. the Avalara tax provider, and other external providers. If in use, they can be viewed by clicking the View system fields button.

With the uploaded images settings (Figure 15.1), you can control how the system treats user-images uploaded from frontend.

Figure 15.1 Control where uploaded images are stored with these settings

You can:

• Select between uploading to a global folder or a folder defined on the paragraph containing the extranet module instance you use for profile creation from the frontend. If you select to use a local folder, it must be defined on the extranet module settings.
• If you select a global folder, you can specify the location of it, and any resize rules you want to enforce.

Additionally, you can specify locations for both custom user files, and the Extranet secure folder.

Figure 15.2 The custom files folder and the extranet secure folder can be defined here

To ensure that the files in the secure folder are protected, your server must be configured to disallow direct download. Contact your hosting company for further information. If you are hosting your own solution, simply disable the read permission on the secure folder in your IIS.

With the Extranet login settings (Figure 16.1), you can set a limit on the number of failed attempts allowed – and customize how the system should treat failed login attempts.

Figure 16.1 Control advanced login settings for the extranet module with these settings

You can also customize, for how long (in days) a login cookie should be valid (Figure 16.2).

Figure 16.2 Control cookie expiration dates with these settings

For integration purposes, it may be needed to include a shopID in the extranet login, if you have an ERP with two accountings – and the same user exists in both accounting, but needs to be directed to an accounting-specific shop.

In that case, you should check this checkbox (Figure 17.1). 

Figure 17.1 Check this box if you need to include a shopID in the login process

Be advised, that you need the Multishop Advanced module for this integration to be possible, and that each shop needs to belong to its own website – or the system will not be able to figure out which of the users with the same name to login.

Don’t forget to to select a default SHOP in the eCommerce settings set in Website properties (Modules > Websites > Edit website > Ecommerce)

With impersonation, you can allow users or user groups to act on behalf of other users or user groups.

They can then log in with their regular extranet login, and select a user to impersonate ([figureref}).

Figure 18.1 The user who impersonates someone will be able to select who to impersonate when logging in

And place orders as the other user (Figure 18.2) - In the backend, add the ‘On behalf of¨’-column by right clicking the column header and selecting it in the column selector.

Figure 18.2 Placing orders on behalf of others

Permissions and impersonation

When impersonating a user, all user permissions will be set as usual for the impersonator – e.g. for pages, modules, etc.

For instance, if Martin logs in and impersonates Sanne:

• Pages that are blocked for Martin are not visible, even if they would be for Sanne.
• Ecommerce orders will appear on order lists for both Martin and Sanne – but will be marked as on behalf of, if that column has been added to the customer center order list template. The orders will be created with Thomas’ discounts, not the discounts applying to Sanne.
• Forum posts, frontend editing, and the like will list Martin as the editor, not Sanne.

In that sense, impersonation does not present a personal liability risk for the users impersonated.

Impersonation settings can be set on both individual users and at a group level, by clicking the Impersonation button in the user or user group ribbon.

This will launch a window (Figure 19.1) where you can select users and user groups to impersonate, and users and user groups who can impersonate this user or user group.

Figure 19.1 Selecting who can impersonate who is done from the impersonation window

If you cannot find the Impersonation button, try saving the user first.

Remember to change your templates in order to support impersonation.

For instance, you can add an impersonation profile selector using the LoopStart(DWExtranetSecondaryUsers) loop, as in the following example:

And in the order list template, use the Ecom:Order.Customer.SecondaryUserName tag to create an “On-behalf of”-column showing which orders haven been added on behalf of which users, and the Ecom:Order.Customer.AccessUserUserName to create a “Order created by” column.

Corresponding sorting tags are also available.

Column headers:

Columns:

There is no developing specific information available for this subject.

A table of all available fields and their values:

In this section you will learn about:

• Importing users
• Exporting users

You can import users to any one of your user groups by simply right clicking the group and selecting import users (Figure 25.1).

Figure 25.1 Right-click on a user group or smart search to be able to import and export users

This takes you to the import users screen (Figure 25.2).

Figure 25.2 When importing users, you can controll the process with these settings

From here, you must:

• Select the import user activity you want to use – use ImportUsers to import users using the CSV provider, and ImportUsersFromExcel to import users using the Excel provider. The excel provider has these limitations:
  • Worksheets must not contain whitespace
  • Do not use merged cells – they will be converted as null or an empty string.
  • First row must contain headers
  • The worksheet you are importing must have the title “AccessUser”
• Select a user input file to import users from. The csv source file requires column names matching the database. See import.csv for an example.
• Decide if you want to remove missing users or not, meaning that users who are not in the import file will be removed from the database
• If you know for a fact that all users in your import file have consented to receive emails from you, check the allow email communication checkbox. This will override whatever value is set in the import file.
• Select the user key field from the dropdown.

To start importing users, simply click Import users in the top left corner of the window.

You can export users from any one of your user groups and smart searches by simply right clicking the group or smart search and selecting export users (Figure 26.1).

Figure 26.1 Click Export users in the right-click menu to export users

This will take you to the export users view, where you can:

• Select the ExportUsers activity to export all user data
• Select the ExportUsersWithSelectedColumns activity to customize which user data to export.

To export your data, simply click Export users in the top left corner of the window. This will create a CSV file with your users.