The use case for my web part is that it connects to my third party service, where organisations will have their own dedicated instance and domain - this needs to be set for that organisation only, but across every web part.
I can't figure out how to allow an administrator to set a preconfigured entry for the manifest when they upload the .sppkg file to their app catalog. Or, how to allow an administrator to set a "global property" for every web part that can't be changed by regular users.
Does anyone have any advice on the above in the modern Sharepoint web part development experience? It seems like a simple task and yet I can't find solid information on it.
The best (only?) way I found, which I ended up using, was to have the admin create a list in Sharepoint containing the data unique to their organisation, and then to use the API to get that list data in the Web Part. A little fiddly, but it works, and once it's set, they can forget it.
Related
I wanted to create a website that would be like a dropbox of sort, which just has files that me and my organization can access. I wanted to password protect the website, just a simple username and password. I have my own domain. I have been looking all over the web to find how to do this(I am a beginner) and found that using httaccess and htpasswd would be used to secure a website similar to what is shown here: http://www.htaccesstools.com/articles/password-protection/
But I cannot seem to get it to work. I am using the s3 bucket and putting the httaccess and htpasswd file in the same folder as the index.html file. Do you know how I would get my site to have a simple password protection(thats not seen in the source code or by typing in the html)? I am not sure if I am finding the directory correctly or not to implement this password protection correctly. Thank you for taking the time to read this and hopefully this makes sense!
Anyone else had this issue?
Amazon AWS alone won't do it. htaccess and htpasswd are also not the right tools for what you want to do.
Get yourself a cheap hosting account with a company like hostgator or godaddy or namecheap or any other that will host your web page and give you PHP and MySQL.
You cannot accomplish what you want just using javascript/jQuery. Those languages run on the browser, but you want to store your files on a server. Therefore, you need the language that controls the server - that is usually PHP. (The other popular solution is ASP, which is by Microsoft and runs on costly and complex Microsoft servers -- PHP is free and runs on (free) Linux and is therefore what ALL of the cheap web hosting companies provide. MySQL is the (free) database that is analogous to Microsoft SQL)
Next, watch a video tutorial on creating a PHP / MySQL login system, such as the ones over at:
phpAcademy (now called codecourse, apparently)
theNewBoston.com
You need to learn more about:
PHP sessions
Ajax
jQuery
MySQL (possibly)
On a basic website, you can stick your files into directories and control who can access those directories by whether or not they are logged in.
You can determine if a visitor is "logged-in" or not by asking for a username/password and setting a session variable. Session variables are just variables that are stored on the server, rather than on a user's own computer (of course, that wouldn't work since every visitor has his own computer and your files are stored on a central server -- so that is where the security (variables) must reside, right?)
Anyway, in a weekend of video watching and trial-and-error you can probably get something cobbled together that will do what you want.
I was hoping someone could help me answer a couple of questions regarding Tableau. I am not as familiar with the platform, but I have a client who is looking for a reporting/analytics/data visualization platform that they could use for many of the internal apps (for their employees) and external (customer facing internet with login) applications.
The driver is that each of their internal teams has used many disparate technologies such as SSRS, Crystal, custom ASP.NET controls (Kendo/Telerik, etc), but now they have the opportunity to choose a common platform that could serve most/all of the future reporting and data visualization needs for enterprise and customer facing solutions.
They are looking for a platform that provides everything from simple grids with basic filter/sort/group, all the way to rich charting and ad-hoc reporting with slicing and dicing of data.
They will not always be creating dashboards in these apps since they are customer-facing, but they may want to have dashboards for internal (intranet) apps. They will definitely want the ability to build true internal BI dashboards to report on data from all these online apps across all customers, to whom they provide their SaaS/customer-facing web apps.
One of our main concerns revolves around security of data, as some of these customer-facing web apps are multi-tenant, so we'd need to ensure that data is always filtered by the client tenant id. Also we have a very customized security model, with data driven roles, permissions that may prevent showing certain types of data (e.g. SSN, Salary, etc) etc.
Does Tableau fits this model, can it meet most/all of these requirements, or is it meant more for internal data?
It should be quite possible by setting up a reverse proxy that would front end your multi tenant web application. There is a document on how to setup Apache as reverse proxy with Tableau with/without SSL.
I am familiar with how to configure Apache as reverse proxy and so here are the details with Apache Web server on how to setup reverse proxy rules.
There may be some documentation for front ending with IIS/Nginx so you should do some googling by yourself.
You need to harden your webserver configuration by limiting access from the external firewall to read only pages and the internal user can access allpages. Since you mentioned that the external users are allowed access to readonly pages, I presume all the requests from external requests will be only GET requests and a few PUT/POST requests when users choose to use filters. So you can block external users from any request except GET. Exceptions should be made for the pages that allow applying filters and grouping.
In your mutitenant application make sure you refer to the tableau URL's by the apache server url that is exposed to the outside world. If any url not configured in apache is used, users will recieve a access denied error. You need to create a role that has readonly access to tableau pages for external users. To address mulitenancy you need to set a cookie or something to identify the tenant and something similar to identify the user. To filter SSN and some more information you can use mod_proxy_html which filters content. You can also use mod_security module of Apache to block SSNs and Credit Card Numbers.
References:
Configuring Apache Server as Proxy with Tableau
Apache mod Proxy documentation
Blocking POST requests
mod_security FAQs
Yes to most of your questions -- with just a little fine print.
First remember Tableau is primarily about visualizing data, so it is great for publishing readonly interactive views of data. If you want allow end users to edit data, you'll have to do that by another means. Fortunately, the Tableau JavaScript API lets you interact closely with Tableau with your custom Javascript code. So if your needs are mostly about visualization, but want want to be able to trigger some custom code to modify data in some of your apps, you should be fine. But Tableau is not designed for creating custom CRUD apps as a rule.
The great thing about Tableau server is that many people can learn to use it and publish their own visualizations -- even if they don't know how to program. That doesn't mean they will win visualization design awards the first time, or that they shouldn't learn something about how databases work if they want have good performance. But it does mean the people that know their data best can learn to design and publish their own visualizations without having to wait three months on a backlog queue so the one IT guy can change the color of a button or add a field. It still would be good to get good system, database and visualization folks to help train, organize data, set governance and security rules, optimize, etc, but business users can learn to be the ones with hands on control over how their information is presented. That's a good thing.
The security question has several moving parts, and usually there are usually good answers from Tableau depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Tableau server does support multi-tenancy using sites. There is fairly flexible permissions and group policy system. It can use SAML for authentication, and has several features providing access to specific to the user/tenant. It works with almost every database, and you can in some cases push your security enforcement to the database server -- SQL server for instance. There is a trusted ticket feature where you can defer some authorization decisions to another server, say a web portal server. Useful when Tableau visualizations are embedded in some other web page.
Most security use cases can be supported out of the box, but there are some complex custom access control situations that are tricky to implement currently in Tableau server. Nothing you've listed sounds out of the normal swim lane, but the only way to know whether your security model is too complex is to dive into the details. Hopefully they will release a custom access control API for users who want to extend it.
At the high level, you sure can use Tableau to build customer-facing dashboards. You can quickly build and deploy those and as others mentioned, you can iFrame them with Javascript APIs, you can customize most of it. But it doesn't provide complete flexibility for user interaction, which you can if you use other technologies. Other options include hand coding framework and then using charting applications.
For simple dashboards, Tableau would be the obvious choice if you have already bought core-licenses. But when looking at what's going on in the industry, Tableau will not be able to fulfill all needs.
If using Tableau
1. Building Charts/Tables/Visualization is a super simple, efficient way.
2. You can expose low grained data to customers, because of Tableau's propitiatory columnar database engine, you can potentially expose millions of records via a dashboard.
3. You can use Tableau's security and access control mechanism.
4. As other user mentioned, you can use trusted ticketing mechanism to integrate easily with other applications (portals etc).
Challenges with Tableau approach.
1. If you have late arriving transactions (in Internet world it's so common to mark a click as fraudulent after few days) with late arriving transactions, you have to have full refresh the extracts, which means if you are showing say 13 months worth of data, you have refresh it all, all the time. Now with bigData, business needs all data all the time, which means you would end up extracting millions of records, throughout the day.
2. Very little flexibility in user interactions, like menus,drop downs etc. you have to work with what's been provided by Tableau.
3. If you have multiple charts on same dashboard page, not so user friendly way to download underlying data.
4. Many other challenges, in laying out visualizations on dashboard page, as there is no easy way to control canvas with pixel control, white spaces etc.
You should be very careful, after analyzing your use case, whether Tableau would be the right product before you invest in it.
Tableau's primary power comes from its desktop tool for data visualization/exploration and not from pre-built dashboards.
Best of luck.
Since Tableau public is also based on Tableau, I assume that you can put your dashboards in public using your own Tableau infrastructure.
Is it possible to make an integration between Alfresco and LDAP to manage groups, users and permissions?
I mean, alfresco groups must be managed with its own set of permissions? Currently I have a LDAP repository to allow authentication, but it is a lot of work to maintain users and groups across multiple systems.
In other words, can i make a full integration between these two environments easily and without modifying the core of alfresco?
Thanks in advance
Short answer is no.
IMHO, externally managed users, groups and authentication are already the maximum to make sense of. Even then, a part of authorities (users / groups) will still be created locally in alfreco when you start using share sites and invite external people. Sure, this could technically be changed, but alfresco writing to LDAP opens a new can of worms. The default LDAP read/sync approach should not cause sigificant extra efforts.
Authorization data, such als roles (which can easily be confused with groups) and permissions and their semantics are highly dependent on application (alfresco). It does not make sense to manage them in an external system that has no clue.
Backstory
I work for a company that has an online site that allows user to text personal information for collection. We collect the data, and make it available online. Users can choose to share the data with other users.
Going Forward
At some point, this may become classified an FDA-governed medical tool. In anticipation, we'd like to have in place a logging system that shows each time someone accesses our users' data, whether it be the user themselves, another authorized user, or a support person.
Current Architecture
We are currently running Ruby/Rails, and using a MySQL database. The personal information is encrypted in the database.
Data Access for Support
Today, support personnel can access data one of three ways:
admin site The admin site is limited to whatever screens we develop. While we don't currently, we could easily add logging to keep an audit trail of who accessed which data using the admin tool.
sql client I use MySQLWorkbench to access production. However, when connected this way, all personal information (user name, cell number, etc), is encrypted.
Ruby Rails console - Finally, support can log into one of the production boxes and use the Ruby/Rails console from command line. Ruby will decrypt the data, so we can do some simple things such as
u=User.find_all_by_state('active')
and it will return the recordset of all users with state='active', and decrypt their personal information in the resultset.
Holy Grail
logging
easy access for support
I'd love to be have a way to allow easy support access (once authenticated) to the data, but would log everything that is accessed (read or updated). That way, if I'm checking out my buddy's ex-wife's data for example, it gets logged to a place where I can't get in and clean it the audit trail. (See Google firing Gmail employee for an example of employees breaching the data policies).
Anyone have ideas, thoughts, experiences, suggestions with this issue?
hey devguy. This was a issue for me a couple months back. We ended up centralizing our mysql queires so that we could start to track all information coming in and out. Unfortunately the class I wrote is in PHP but the idea behind it could make it very easy to start logging.
https://code.google.com/p/php-centralized-mysql-controller/
Try stored procedures. Make all code use the stored procedures for CRUD activities. This defines an API that your developers can use while business rules are global enforced (don't return entire SSN values, but only last 4 digits, etc).
This serves as the basis for an external API as well.
If you want logging/auditing, you put it in the procedure.
This protects you from everyone except the DBAs.
Is it possible to set Access persmissions using Active Directory users?
Edit: The overall objective is to allow some users to see certain tables and deny this permission for other users. I'm wondering if it can be done using active directory users.
Depends on what you mean by Access permissions. Access user level security do not interact with Active Directory in any way. ACC: Microsoft Access Security FAQ Available in Download Center It is suggested you reread this FAQ several times. I must admit I never quite understood it. Also see ACC2000: Overview of How to Secure a Microsoft Access Database
Now what you could do is read the Active Directory data for the logged in user and groups and such. Then with some local tables mapping the various AD groups along with the login userid to the various objects and menu items in Access you could control access in this fashion. Note however that local tables can possibly be mucked with by a savvy user, etc, etc.
The most useful URL I found was the following newsgroup posting need help on get list of W2K ad Domain (fqdn) by using VB Options I kept a page of notes when I was working on this topic but they may or may not be useful. I can post them if desired.
I agree with the things that both Tony and Philippe has posted. I just want to add a bit:
If you really need security, then a Jet/ACE back end is not going to do the job for any significant definition of the word "security". Jet ULS is crackable and fairly easily so for anyone with even basic programming chops. Thus, if it's DATA SECURITY that you're looking form, Philippe is right that you should choose a different database engine.
But if you are only looking to control ACCESS in your front-end application, you have three choices:
maintain a couple of tables in your database of your users and the permissions on each of the objects.
implement Jet user-level security.
use AD users/groups in place of Jet ULS.
None of these choices is seamless.
And all of them mean that your front-end has to be programmed to deal with the issues.
If you're restricting access for security reasons, then it makes sense to use a database engine that integrates with Windows security (i.e., SQL Server).
If you're doing it just to streamline program flow, and to adapt the app at runtime to the needs of particular users, then you don't necessarily need security on the data store so much as you need a way to keep track of who is using the database and what groups they belong to, and then what parts of the app they should have access to (and, secondarily, what level of access, read/write, read-only, etc.).
I have used Jet ULS for this last purpose for years, but have never been entirely happy with it because it's not that easy to make it user-manageable. Integration with AD would be a good choice, but that means that whoever administers your app needs to have the permission to manage AD users. This may not be something your friendly neighborhood sysadmin is willing to agree to.
On the other hand, if you end up needing both back-end security and front-end access control, you can't beat a SQL Server back end using Windows security for one-stop shopping via AD.
According to the few questions you posted these last days on Access, it seems obvious to me that you should consider switching your tables (not your forms) from an Access/mdb file to a SQLExpress server, where all these security issues can be easily managed. Upsize your database, add your connection string as a public variable in your client app (or in an xml file, local table, or anything else that can hold the string, even an extra property of your access file can do the trick through the currentDb.createProperty method), and go for a real client-server configuration.