Ok, you have your GoldMine installed and you want to add a user. You open up the User Settings and click ‘New’. You fill in the desired username, full name and the password. You also see this curious checkbox with the word ‘Master Rights’. You are not exactly sure what this means, but you’ve heard somewhere it has to do with administering GoldMine. What you have heard is true, but there are many more truths in life and it is these other truths that can hurt you.
Within GoldMine there is something called a Master Rights account. This account is similar to the administrative user account in Windows NT, 2000, and XP Pro. With Novell, it is the Supervisor account and in Linux it is the Root account. Users that have been granted the rights these accounts carry become ‘all powerful’. They can also become ‘all dangerous’. The choice to grant master rights to your GoldMine users is not something to be taken lightly.
GoldMine master users are permitted access to all portions of GoldMine and can bypass any security features. The only areas of GoldMine a master rights user cannot venture are the Personal Base of the InfoCenter and the Personal Rolodex of other users. Everything else is wide open. It is for this reason you should have no more master rights users within the organization than is absolutely necessary, and those that do have these rights should be clearly defined as users that genuinely need total access to GoldMine.
Master Rights Do’s:
- Do give at least one user master rights. You need this to add users and do system administration.
- Do give master rights to ONLY those users that have a genuine need.
- Do change the passwords of master rights users frequently.
- Do change the default Master account password after GoldMine is installed. Better yet, create a new master account under a different username and remove the original ‘MASTER’ account.
Master Rights Don’ts:
- Don’t give master rights to a user just because they are ‘the boss’. This one can be tough to avoid, but try for the sake of your sanity.
- If you are undocking licenses for installations on remote machines, don’t undock all the user accounts available unless at least one has been granted master rights.
- Don’t give out master rights user passwords to non-master rights users.
Used wisely, GoldMine’s Master Rights can be a wonderful thing and can reduce the workload of administrators by spreading the administrative load. Used unwisely, these rights can become one of the worst administrative nightmares you will ever encounter.
