Business plus can't upload unless logged in as Admin

[alexwren]

Hello new look forum! (p.s can we choose our own colours, lilac is not for me...)

I have just installed Business Plus 9.0.5 at a clients premises and am horified to discover that to upload products you need to be logged in as administrator.

That is surely crazy. Isn't the whole point of multi-user that you can all do different things simultaneously. Yes I appreciate there has to be some limitations due to an Access DB and other realities of sharing software. However if you set a user to be able to manage content you would expect them to be able to upload it when they have made their changes. This seems half baked as you can only have one admin account logged in at a time. This makes the whole purpose of us purchasing the sw slightly redundant.

What I would like to be able to do is override the software somehow to be able to give content users the ability to upload OR have more than one admin account logged in at a time. Either would solved the problem from my point of view.

Our set-up is this:

2x order processing accounts (warehouse and shopfront)
2x order processing & content management account (office)
1x admin account on main server (to be used by us via terminal services).

Can anyone make any suggestions as to how we might be able to solve this please.

Thanks for listening....

Alex

[alexwren]

Update

Just spoke to Andy Porter (our sales manager) and he did not know that you had to be logged in as Admin to perform uploads.

I am feeling rather let down here...

Any hacks or clever ways to fix would be greatly appreciated.

[completerookie]

Its Hack/registry time . . .

I'm with you on this one - I will not allow anyone to log in as admin, with that much privilege, they can do what they want

Andy Porter might not know, but its been talked of many times on this forum and I raised it with support
.
I solved this problem (on v8) by changing the access rights of the various parts in the registry - all of them were set to "admin" and now they are set to "power user"

all of the "rights" are set at install time, and as it works with lesser rights, I don't know why actinic insist on Admin rights.

Sorry, can't remember exactly which keys need changeing, but basically I changed all of the keys relating to Actinic.

please, please, do not do anything on the registry without backing it up first

kev

[chris ashdown]

Sorry I don,I see the problem

Anyone can be assigned as admin, true only one at a time but you can for instance have me Chris as one user with basic rights and also have me as user chrisadmin with full admin rights along with say bill and billadmin

If you are logged in as chrisadmin and bill wants to take over he can log in as billadmin and a warning will come up asking if you want admin to change to billadmin and log me out

If you don't trust your staff to use admin rights why do you employ them

Normally it would be wiser to just have one person ammend the sites for continuity and keep the contents simular in design

[alexwren]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your feedback.

We are talking about two people who are partners in a business and both tend to work on the site as needed.

My concern is that I am now going to have to say login (at least one of you) as your normal user to make changes and then relogin as admin if you need to do an upload. I can see that one of them will probably remain logged in as admin all the time and then if we try to terminal service into the server to make some design changes we will end up booting one of them out.

I appreciate it works fine for you but for this sceanrio it is far from ideal. No where that I can remember did it mention this limitation (not that the sales info is that detailed anyway). When I checked with Andy P he also did not realise this and he sold it to me...

It seems some flexibility in this software is what is needed. The user settings are fairly basic and could do with some more options to suit different situations.

My big problem is I did not know anything about this limitation until we had purchased and installed it on site. I grilled both Andy P and the support staff to find out as much as possible and this was never mentioned.

Alex

[alexwren]

Its Hack/registry time . . .

Sorry, can't remember exactly which keys need changeing, but basically I changed all of the keys relating to Actinic.

kev

Thanks Kev,

Now the big question is where would you get this information.... Can I ask support or will they shoot me down in a hail of hack abuse?

Alex

[completerookie]

for me, I support PC's for a living, have done for 25yrs, so the registry isn't anything scary, - I didn't get any joy with support, but having said that, I didn't press them

you could put the system on to a laptop and then "play with the registry" until it works
Acronis (backup software) does a fantastic backup system ad a "try before you commit" system - available on a trial basis - ebay licence was £22.00 , so you could again play with acronis, make a good backup, then play, then restore

the clues are:
find the "software key for actinic" and then for each level, right click - choose "permission" and then add the "power users" to that list - the "actinic keys" may be in multiple places though, so keep hunting through the registry

I'm running v8 multi-site, not multi-user so I'm not 100% sure how the multi-user side works, but it's got to be something to do with "access rights" to the registry


but once again, backup, backup, backup ! ! !

please "play safe", I'm giving clues, not the definitive solution, so don't blame me

kev

[Toby B]

Hey guys,

Yes, I'm afraid support or development can't assist with any sort of hacks like this to the registry.

[completerookie]

if you won't support hacks like this (and I understand why) , then please please reduce the requirement to need to be an admin-user to do everyday things like using "normal software" -


we purposely force users to use admin privileges WHEN they need to, this way they have to think a little bit more about doing important things and not just click buttons because they can, this then prevents "rogue" programmes from having full access to our machines.

Yes I use antivirus, firewalls, dns hacks to prevent unwanted intrusions, but its all to easy to click buttons and do bad things to your computers

[chris ashdown]

I understand you want two people to upload the site, but if this happens how do you control it, one person if half way through some mod whilst the other is working on something else, one of you update and the system crashes, who knows what part caused it?, who does the backups? snapshots wont work if others are logged onto the same site

I may be wrong but would imagine not many want this feature

[itc]

I understand you want two people to upload the site, but if this happens how do you control it, one person if half way through some mod whilst the other is working on something else, one of you update and the system crashes, who knows what part caused it?, who does the backups? snapshots wont work if others are logged onto the same site

I may be wrong but would imagine not many want this feature

I wouldn't want it for the reasons stated, but I think it would be good if one client knew what the other was doing and atleast be able to flag 'sorry an upload is in progess on another machine, try again later' - in a way it harks to this wishlist request by norman.