Tuesday, May 21, 2013

PeopleSoft Application Fundamentals - Securing Chartfields

Hi,

Its been a while since I updated this blog, but I was busy with other things. Well, here is the next post in which we will see how to secure chartfields.

The first question is - what is the need to secure them?

The answer is that different users in the organization will have different needs and different levels of data access. To conform to this scenario, PeopleSoft allows administrators to configure data access to different users based on their roles and needs.

To implement this security feature efficiently, PeopleSoft allows security to be set by roles, user or permission list. This feature is enabled only for those pages that have amount fields and other sensitive information. Sensitive data could be categorized as assets, inventory and other expense related items.

Chartfield Security feature allows :
  • Enabling & disabling access based on product, component, user, role or permission list.
  • Restricting access to transactions containing unauthorized Chartfield values, distribution code values in relevant components, financial data containing unauthorized Chartfield values in Inquiry components, unauthorized Chartfield values during data entry.
  • Specify components as exceptions for users, role or permission list.
Following are the ways with which one can implement Chartfield security :
  • From Component search lists
  • From Inquiry Page lists
  • From Inquiry results
  • From Drills to transaction components
  • From Prompt edit table values
  • From Distribution codes
The following pictures describe which pages are enabled for chartfield security for each PeopleSoft product.



To set up Chartfield security, you have to follow the steps below :
  1. Define security options and products
  2. Identify security requirements
  3. Define and assign security rules
  4. (Optional step) Copy security rules for users, roles or permission lists
The following should be in place before chartfield security can be implemented :
  1. Identified chartfields that meet the security requirements
  2. Security levels that are needed

The above is all that is needed to implement chartfield security. Of course, each individual product will have its own components to be secured. This is something that is being left to the reader to explore.

The next posts will move out of PS Application Fundamentals and will focus on implementation steps for PS FSCM modules.