In our old version of Epicor 7 you could copy user profiles for easy setup. Is there a way to do that in Epicor 10? I looked for related posts but only found some to copying user profile favorites not the whole profile with company/workstations/settings.
The short answer is no–we do not have an exact built-in “copy existing user to new user” mechanism.
The longer answer is we mostly do through a number of different mechanisms, but it requires a little planning.
Epicor ERP 10 includes a comprehensive access rights system where users–or **groups of users–are assigned access rights to any table, field, form, menu option, or service operation. Acess rights can be defined inclusively (explicitly allowed access) or exclusively (explicitly disallowed access). On top of all that, there are a number of ERP-specific security partitions supported by the system. These include things like companies, departments, sales territories, and manufacturing sites.
From a best practices standpoint, individual users should not be granted access rights to an object/entity within the application–only a role should be assigned access to object/entities and when a user is a member of that role that individual user inherits that role’s access rights.
How does Epicor ERP handle job roles within our access rights system? The key to maintainable security within Epicor (or AD for that matter) is the use of what Epicor calls Security Groups. For example, you create one Security Group called “Shipping and Receiving SG” and that Security Group is granted access to the things that someone with that role should have access to on the main menu, within process/service security, in field security, etc–nothing more, nothing less. So, you hire a new shipping and receiving person–what do you do? You could:
- manually create a new Epicor user.
- assign that new user to the appropriate companies and plants/sites within the application.
- assign that user to the “Shipping and Receiving SG” and they automatically get the same access rights as everyone else that is in that same group.
Any access right one can assign to an indiviudal user can be assigned to a Security Group.
So, that gives us
MECHANISM ONE–SECURITY GROUPS:
Security groups get us some of the way to answering your question about copying a user (insofar as to the goal of copying a user which is ease of applying access rights) but it doesn’t help with access to entities like companies or sites.
Which leads us to our second mechanism (which absolutely requires that the first mechanism is in use)
MECHANISM TWO- IMPORT ACTIVE DIRECTORY USER(S) | IMPORT EXTERNAL USERS
These two processes within the Epicor Administration Console allow someone to bulk create new users based off a “template” user that already exists within the application. During these import processes, we will create the new users so that they have access to all of the same companies, sites, and security groups that the template user selected during import have access to BUT new users do not inherit any access rights based on items that they are individually granted access to. Within the Epicor Administration Console (EAC) Help, the steps needed to use those functions are documented.
That gets one to the mathmatically proven 94.7% of the way to the objective of “copying a user”, which is:
- applying access rights to a new user based on an existing security group.
- applying access rights to Epicor entities like companies and sites.
In the remaining 5.3%, we have things like:
- favorites.
- workstations.
And we can even help with the favorites part: (workstations AFAIK will still be a manual assignment)
MECHANISM THREE-COPY FAVORITES(MODERN MENU) USING EXPORT LAYOUT:
- Log into Epicor as the user that has the favorites that you wish to copy.
- Click on Settings from the Home page.
- Click on Home Page, and select Export Layout.
- Log in with the Epicor user that you wish to import the favorites, and basically do these steps in reverse select Import Layout in step 2.
- Any favorites to menu items that the source user has access to but the destination user doesn’t won’t be imported.
GUIDANCE FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS TO UNWIND THIS STUFF TOO OFTEN:
Pick a naming convention for Security Groups and Epicor User Names/IDs as there are a number of places where Security Group names and Epicor usernames appear in the same list. For example:
Some examples
-All security groups names are in all caps, and all user names are in mixed case e.g. SECURITY GROUP vs Firstname [Middle Initial] Lastname
-All security groups have a leading dash or underscore in the name(so they present at the top of the list), and user names do not e.g. Security Group _SALESMGR
-Instead of spaces in security group names you use an underscore instead. e.g. SHIPPING_&_RECEIVING
-Could append SG on the Security Group names e.g. SHIPPING_&_RECEIVING_SG
-Better yet, all of the above to eliminate all doubt! e.g. _SHIPPING_&_RECEIVING_SG
Perhaps one doesn’t need to go to that extreme 
, but, the broader point is that a little planning at the beginning will save a lot of time later on.
Once access rights are granted via Security Groups instead of to individual users, it is relatively trivial to reuse all of that work for another user either manually or via the User Import processes listed above.
Hope that helps.
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Awesome, thanks Nathan.
Moved to Experts’ Corner
If you are referring to a basic user copy you can do that via the Administration console. Go to the application server and expand the user node. Highlight the user, and select COPY in the lower right side. After that, a PASTE will appear in the top right. Click that.
When you click PASTE the following box will appear.
Fill in the new username and full name and you are all set to go. This carries the basic configuration with it.
Ross
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FWIW - the Phone number field of an E10 user is smaller than what Active Directory allows. We would have had to trim every phone number in our AD, in order to mass create the users.
Oh Ticket that!!!
Good stuff. Any thoughts on Sales user replication for the future?? Creating a sales team member is quite the ordeal - Person record, workforce, territory assignments, rights and visibility or orders, quotes, etc.
A “copy user” would be a real time saver here. Consider this a Post-It for future consideration.
Whilst no real easy way around this, I used to Ctrl-shift the form I was working on a second time and selected the person I was copying from. I guess you could copy the record to excel from the list view, manipulate and paste insert. I used to do that for Quick Time Codes as we had a lot of default indirect codes. That being said I had to un-dock the list view to get it to accept the paste insert without error (That was on 9.05.701).
I also used to have a small spreadsheet that I used to keep track of the tasks I did for each user creation. There were a few steps.
I agree doing the workforce/sales rep was a bit of a headache. I remember early on in the piece I created a user and missed adding the salesperson record to the default territory. They could not log cases, took me ages to nut out what the problem was.
Indeed. Some of the mundane admin tasks aren’t changing fast enough. There are many exciting things afoot, but I do rely on my documented steps, as you’ve mentioned. These setup steps (including the dreaded context menu customizations by department [aka by user]) cost me lots of setup time.
However, I’m sure Epicor will get there; It seems like rapid change is taking place.
Does the admin console tool also copy the user work force and all authorized users. How about the Contact Entry for the user, employee, and any other links?
I tried to use **MECHANISM THREE-COPY FAVORITES(MODERN MENU) USING EXPORT LAYOUT: ** Interestingly, Everytime I attempt to save the XML file to a USB drive or a network location, nothing is saved. No error notice. It just doesn’t …
There is a solution out there which will copy users in one of two ways
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a new person comes in the organisation and you want to give them the same privileges as a current user, the solution will copy the user settings and loop through all the security.
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a person is promoted from one department to another, the solution will then do the same as above but for a user already in the system