Hands On With the GP Power Tools – Administrator Tools: Security Analyzer

This post is part of the Hands On With the GP Power Tools (GPPT) – Administrator Tools series in which I am taking a hands on look at the various tools offered by GPPT.

The Security Analyzer is a tool for administrators to analyze the security settings of their Microsoft Dynamics GP system. It is designed to highlight potential security risks, provide information on unused settings as well as provide a comparison between security access and security resources actually used.

The Security Analyzer has over twenty queries which can be displayed in both Summary and Detail formats. The queries are divided into System Level queries and User & Companies queries. For the Users & Companies queries, you can select the User and/or Company to limit the query data to.

Be aware, some of the queries in the Security Analyzer window use the Security Log window’s activity data captured by the Security Activity Tracking option enabled from the Administrator Settings window, which I covered in this post.

Once the data is displayed, it can be exported if desired, or used to drill down to the relevant system windows to be able to make changes to the system and security settings.

When you launch Security Analyzer (GP Power Tools area page >> Reports >> Security Analyzer), you will be prompted to confirm that you are on a machine whiuch has all Product Dictionaries installed; click Yes to proceed:

The navigation tree allows you to select what you want to analyse. My first port of call when testing tis window was to check which users have the POWERUSER role. Do this by expanding the Users node and clicking on Users assigned to POWERUSER Role. This will show a count of users assigned to the role; in my case 4 users have POWERUSER:

Double clicking on the row in the detail pane will drill down and show the users with this role; in my case, there is no problem as it is the sa and DYNSA users in my two companies:

All of the nodes are expandable and allow you to analyze your security. There are some really nice views on the security avauilable via this window; it is best used in conjunction with the Security Information window.