Managing Users and User Groups

Groups, Users and Server Wide Access Permissions

Users are individual entities registered on the CodeBeamer server. Groups are collections of users with similar permissions. The scope of the group access permission is server-wide. With groups you can group users on the CodeBeamer server into logical sets, and you can assign them different sever-wide permissions, such as whether they are allowed to create projects or view the personal data of other users. You can use groups to grant different server-wide access permissions for corporate users, off-shore users, customers, partners and others.

With the New Group Link you can create a new custom group, and grant specific permissions. The selection from the Template Group combo box will influence what the proposed initial rights will be in the group you are about to create.

Change System Administrator's Name and Password

You can change the system administrator's name and password. CodeBeamer is shipped with a default system administrator user with the name bond and 007 password. The account's name and password data is changed in the same way as a regular user account. Select Account Info, then Edit Account and edit the name and password fields, and save.

Managing Groups

Users are assigned to existing groups. Only users from the System Administrators group can administer group permissions. See Creating New Groups.

Figure: Managing User Groups.

To edit a group access permissions:

1. Click on System Admin,
2. Click on User Groups,
3. Click on the Edit link in context menu for the desired group,
4. Change the permissions in the Edit Group screen,
5. Click on Save.

Figure: Edit Group Permissions.

Creating New Groups

Using groups you can assign similar sever-wide permissions to users (i.e. external, internal, customer, manager etc.).

New Groups cannot be created without a license.

To create a new group:

1. Click on System Admin,
2. Click on User Groups,
3. Click on New Group,
4. Fill out Group, Description (LDAP/AD Group Name)
5. Change the permissions (if you select an existing group from the Based on selector, the group permissions will be copied from this existing group),
6. Click on Save.

Figure: Creating a New Group.

Deleting a Group

To delete a group:

1. Click on System Admin,
2. Click on User Groups,
3. Select the groups to be deleted and click on Edit in the context menu
4. Then click on the Delete button.

Managing User Accounts

New Account

In the User Accounts link from the System Admin tab, you can also select New Account, to create accounts. The required fields have red star next to the field label.

Assign User to a Group

You can assign a user to a group manually or automatically when a new account has been created.

To manually assign a new account to a group, check the appropriate field(s) in the New Account form, as described above.

To manually change the assignment of an existing account to a group:

1. Click on System Admin,
2. Click on User Groups,
3. Click on the Assign members on the context menu for a group,
4. Choose the user accounts to assign to the group,
5. Click on Assign Members.

Change User Account Upload Limits

You can set a maximum file-size for files that are uploaded by a user onto a server in the New Account form. This is the maximum for one particular user.

The default maximum upload (1G) is automatically selected in the New Account form using the default entry -1 in the Upload Limit (in kB) field.

You can also change the upload limit for all users in: Post-installation Configuration

Delete a User Account

See "Disable a User Account" in the next section.

Disable a User Account

The license manager does not count disabled user accounts. It is better practice to disable a user account than to delete it. In some other systems you can delete accounts, however the disadvantage is that the user history, notification settings, permissions, roles will disappear from the system. In CodeBeamer you can't delete users, instead you disable them. Disabled users cannot log in, however the account remains on the server with all its related history, settings and references are preserved.

It is important understanding that disabled accounts cannot be reactivate because to fulfil compliance rules. Starting with codeBeamer 9.5, disabled users lose:

• Associated Product Licenses
• Roles
• Project memberships

The application shows a warning before disabling the users to remind Administrators to these facts:

Import Users From Microsoft Excel (xls, xlsx) or CSV file in Microsoft Excel style

You can import a user list into CodeBeamer from Microsoft Excel sheet or from a CSV file in Microsoft Excel style.

To import from CSV file, the first step is to create a CSV file with user data.

The following requirements have to be met for a successful user import:

1. You must have sufficient free licenses on CodeBeamer server;
2. The CSV file should have at minimum four fields: account-name, first-name, last-name and e-mail. Each row must have the same number of field separators.

Figure: Semicolon Separated (;) File Containing User Data.

account; name; First Name; email
cb.jakab.gipsz; Gipsz; Jakab; gipsz.jakab.test@test.test.com
cb.eszter.vincs; Vincs; Eszter; vincs.eszter.test@test.test.com

To import users from an Microsoft Excel or a CSV file:

1. Click on System Admin,
2. Click on User Accounts,
3. Click on Import Accounts and then select the format (Microsoft Excel or CSV file in Microsoft Excel style),
4. Upload the file, in case of CSV import, select Field separator and Character Set.
5. Click on Next and assign the appropriate column with the appropriate field,
6. Check on the preview site if the column assignment is correct. By pressing the Back button you can go back and change the assignments.
7. Finalize the import (see below).

Figure: Importing Accounts -- Import Wizard (1).

Figure: Assign Columns to Match the Input Fields -- Import Wizard (2).

Figure: Import Preview -- Import Wizard (3).

To finalize the import:

1. Check the Overwrite/Update existing Accounts checkbox if you want to overwrite existing accounts.
   A user account is existing if the user is found by their account name that is mapped from the Excel file.
2. Check the Send notification emails to imported users checkbox if you want to send a notification email to the created users.
3. Select the group, to which the accounts are to be assigned, from the Assign to Group field.
4. Select the account type from the Account Type field.
5. Select the default status of the new users from the Set Status of NEW users to field.
   A user account is new if the user is not found by their account name that is mapped from the Excel file.If the Excel file contains a valid value for the status, it will be set regardless of the value that is set in the Set Status of NEW users to field. Otherwise, if the Excel file does not have a valid value for the status, the setting depends on whether it is a new user or an existing user.
6. Choose whether the status of the existing users is to be changed by using the Update Status of Existing users without a Status in the import field.
7. Click on the Import button to finalize the import.

When you have named licenses and the number of licenses you have after the import is insufficient, you can contact Intland to purchase more licenses (sales@intland.com), or you can log in as System Administrator and disable specific user accounts as described above. User authentication can also be managed by LDAP. You can import and update user account information using an LDAP service. See Post-installation Configuration for more information.

If user data is exported from Codebeamer to Excel and the language is not set to English, the exported Excel file contains localized status values. This means that, for example, if the Codebeamer user language is set to German, the exported Excel file contains Aktiv instead of Activated. If the user intends to use this exported Excel file to import user data and the Codebeamer user language is set to German, the import also accepts the status data that is translated to German.

The use case in this example works only if the Codebeamer user language is set to German.

Managing Anonymous User Access

Also See Authentication and Access Control in codeBeamer

To provide anonymous user access on CodeBeamer for specific projects follow these steps.

Create an Anonymous Group

Go to System Admin select User Groups and create an Anonymous Group (New Group).

Figure: Creating an Anonymous Group.

Create an Anonymous User in the Anonymous Group

Create an anonymous user account, set the e-mail to an invalid address to avoid notifications and set the password (e.g. to supersecret). Choose Member in Groups: anonymous group. The system admin can change the password later.

Figure: Creating an Anonymous User Account.

Assign New Accounts to Anonymous Group

From User Registration, set Anonymous User: with the account anonymous_test. Select the anonymous group check-box so that all new accounts will be part of the Anonymous group.

Figure: Specify Account Anonymous

Set Anonymous Role in a Project

Logout as "sysadmin" and Login with your normal account and create an anonymous role in your project and set the anonymous role permissions to be as restrictive as you wish for anonymous users. You can add Anonymous Role in Members page by clicking on Add Role label.

Figure: Create “Anonymous” Role Permissions.

Assign the Anonymous Group to the Anonymous Role

From the Members tab, assign the anonymous group with the anonymous role in your project. Click on Add new Group and Select Anonymous from the Groups in the Step1 section and then Anonymous Role from the Roles section (Step2), click Add.

Figure: Assign the Anonymous Group to the Anonymous Role.

You will see the Anonymous Group with Anonymous Role on the Members page.

Login as anonymous/supersecret and test the permissions you are granted. Change the password supersecret to your own password for security reasons.

Logged In User Information

In the System Admin tab, next to the User Accounts on the first line, is a Logged In link. This reveals information about currently logged-in users, and those who have logged in over the past 14 days.

User Registration Options

To set User Registration options:

1. Click on System Admin,
2. Click on User Registration.

Figure: System Administration - User registration.

New Account

You can set the members (by whom) and the method (how) by which new accounts are created on the server.

Assign New Accounts to Groups

When a new account has been created (manual registration, import, LDAP), the new user account is assigned to a group based on this setting. A default group could be a standard one such as Regular User, Customer, Developer - External or a custom one.

Registration Message Sender

On new account registration, the registration confirmation mail will be sent from this address (i.e. codebeamer@intland.com).

Notify After Account Activation

This option specifies the e-mail address of the user who will be notified about new account registration events.

Disallowed User E-mail Addresses

When you don't want to accept registrations from particular email addresses, you can enter regular expressions here to filter them out, such as (.*@t-online.ukr)|(.*@ru.net).

CodeBeamer uses the expression syntax available in the Java Standard Edition core library version 1.4 or greater. This package has support for Perl-like regular expressions so, if you are familiar with using regular expressions in Perl, you can use the same syntax. See http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/releases/1.4regex/, and a tutorial and overview of regular expressions in Mastering Regular Expressions, Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, O'Reilly and Associates, 1997, ISBN: 1-56592-257-3.

Registration Confirmation E-Mail Text

This is the automatic welcome e-mail sent to new accounts at registration time. The syntax used for defining the message is that of the Velocity macro engine (http://velocity.apache.org/).

Automatic Login

Allow or disable automatic login using HTTP cookies.

Single Sign-On by HTTP Request Header

Where the HTTP header exists, it can be used to allow automatic sign-on (SSO). For example, see Novell's iChain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetIQ_Access_Manager

Account Activity

Toggle to turn on and off the tool-tip display of a user account's last activity under the Logged In part of User Accounts in the System Admin toolset.

Encrypting Sensitive User Data

System administrators can encrypt all sensitive user data. First open the user's page from System Admin toolset.

Figure: System Administration - User listing

Click on Edit Account and disable the user.

Figure: System Administration - User details

Click on Edit Account and click on Encrypt Sensitive User Data. Important! It is not possible to retrieve encrypted user data after saving the changes! Starting from codeBeamer 9.5 this also encrypts the user name of users added from LDAP.

Figure: Encrypting user data

Figure: System Administrator must save the encrypted data

Figure: An encrypted user