Recommended MIS Security Settings Page 1 of 7 Xporter Edition This information applies to all editions of Groupcall Xporter. Version Control Date Author Notes 1 2010-11-22 Tim Verlander 2 2010-11-23 Tim Verlander Highlighted impact of minimum settings on multiple extracts
Contents Xporter Edition... 1 Version Control... 1 Xporter Recommended MIS Security Settings... 3 Are the Recommended MIS Security Settings Safe?... 4 Page 2 of 7 Credentials... 4 Data Selection... 4 Data Agreement... 4 My Organisation Cannot Use the Recommended MIS Security Settings... 5 Identifying the Minimum Necessary MIS Security Settings... 6 Where can I go for further information?... 7
What is Xporter and why is it being installed? Groupcall Xporter is a versatile data extraction tool and can take information from a wide variety of systems, including the most common School MIS systems, and present it to other systems in a standardised format. Many companies choose to use Groupcall Xporter to extract data for their software in order to simplify the data extraction process by not needing direct access to the many different MIS systems in use. The company that supplied Groupcall Xporter to you has approached Page 3 of Groupcall 7 and provided us with a data specification, which Groupcall Xporter produces by querying your MIS system, and a secure upload mechanism, which Groupcall Xporter will use to transmit the data. Groupcall Xporter is used by a wide number of different vendors, including cashless catering, payment systems, library systems, attendance reporting software and local authorities. Xporter Recommended MIS Security Settings Because Groupcall Xporter is a versatile data extraction tool and provides data extracts for a very wide variety of systems the support requirements can be very complex and vary depending on what Xporter is being used for and where it is extracting data from. In order to simplify the customer setup and support experience Groupcall makes a recommendation on security settings for MIS access that provides a good balance of versatility, security, simplicity and supportability. The recommended MIS security settings for the two most common MIS systems are detailed below. If you are using a MIS system that isn t listed them please contact the Groupcall partner that provided you with Xporter for details of the recommended MIS security settings. For Capita SIMS.net Groupcall recommends the following group memberships for the user accessing SIMS: Personnel Officer School Administrator Senior Management Team Third Party Reporting For Facility CMIS Groupcall recommends use of the stud_admin schema, via the STUD_ADMIN user.
Are the Recommended MIS Security Settings Safe? The recommended MIS security settings for data extraction are designed to expose all information within an MIS for potential extraction by Xporter. Xporter security covers three areas: Credentials Xporter encrypts the password used to access the MIS system such that it cannot be used by anything other than Xporter. Page 4 of 7 Data Selection Xporter cannot arbitrarily access data, it only extracts what it has been scripted to obtain. Data Agreement Data agreements are a legal enforceable agreement (in the case of statutory data collection by Local Authorities data agreements may be implicit) between the Groupcall partner providing Xporter and the organisation that Xporter has been installed in. They specify the scope and purpose of data collection. An Xporter extraction will be designed to the specification of the Groupcall partner and will therefore comply with the data agreement.
My Organisation Cannot Use the Recommended MIS Security Settings If the requirements of your organisation do not allow use of the recommended MIS security settings then there are a number of options available to you: If the organisation does not allow one individual to hold the recommended MIS security settings then a dedicated account can be created for Xporter to use. This ensures that there is no sharing of MIS accounts and that the account is only used for defined Xporter extracts. Page 5 of 7 If the organisation does not allow MIS accounts that do not belong to individuals then Xporter can be configured to run using a SIMS account belonging to a specific person with the necessary security rights. In this configuration Xporter would automatically share the account with the individual it belonged to. If the organisation requires human intervention for data extracts then the data extraction can be executed manually by setting and clearing the Xporter MIS password value. This means that extracts can only be run under immediate supervision of an individual with the appropriate rights to SIMS and would not be able to run automatically. If the organisation requires the minimum necessary MIS security settings to be applied instead of the recommended MIS security settings then these can be identified and applied. This requires identification of the minimum necessary MIS security setting for each column in an extraction, including those used internally during generation, and then configuration of MIS security settings to support an aggregation of those minimum necessary MIS security settings.
Identifying the Minimum Necessary MIS Security Settings For any given extract there may be a smaller subset of the recommended MIS security settings that would allow successful data extraction. This subset is called the Minimum Necessary MIS Security Settings and is likely to vary for each extract configured. Because Xporter uses a single account to connect to an MIS this means that it will be necessary to aggregate multiple sets of Minimum Necessary MIS Security Settings into a single set of permissions in order to run multiple extracts. If an organisation requires the identification of the minimum necessary Page MIS 6 security of 7 settings then Groupcall can supply details of the columns being extracted from MIS to calculate and output an extract. Your organisation can then apply their local knowledge to identify and assign specific security rights. Please be aware that while Groupcall will support any customer using minimal security requirements, the following conditions apply to this: If an issue is investigated and the cause is identified as use of security settings other than the Recommended MIS Security Settings then the support time in identifying and resolving that issue may be chargeable. If an organisation wishes to engage Groupcall to identify the minimal security requirements for a specific report then this work may be chargeable.
Where can I go for further information? Groupcall recommends that, in the first instance, you should contact the company that supplied Groupcall Xporter to you as they will know most about their software, the data extracted and how the data is transmitted and used. Page 7 of 7