We’re working on a menu security group restructure/refresh, as our epicor structure has not kept up well with changes to the business over the years.
A huge headache for us is being able to slot each individual user into a job-function based Security Group like “Sales”, “Inventory”, “Packing Manager”, etc. Sure, everyone fit nicely in the categories when they were created 10 years ago in E9, but the staff and positions themselves change so much over the years that nowadays no one fits well into the groups and everything is a one off. Not to mention, no one has a clue anymore which menus are granted from which security groups or what the relevant differences between groups are.
So, I’m mulling over how to approach a refresh in a way that won’t deteriorate so quickly. I think I want to shift away from job-function based groups and more towards grouping by the menus themselves… For example, “Basic Trackers”, “Financial Trackers”, “Sales Entry Screens” as groups of menus and then even individual groups for certain menus like “Part Entry” where we need to get that granular. This would mean many more security groups attached to each user and that managers would have to be good at communicating to IT exactly which menus their employees need. But I am optimistic something like this could work well, and also have some dashboard ideas to give managers more transparency into who has access to what. But I’m looking for feedback and other folks’ experiences as I have not seen a setup like this been done before… Every epicor implementation I’ve seen has done it organizing by job function.
P.S. Menu security is of course just one aspect of epicor security, and we are looking at other areas too, but I wanted to keep this thread focused on menu. I just watched @josecgomez and @bderuvo 's podcast with @Mark_Wonsil and plan to post some questions on those topics next!
We just went through this process with ours since it hadn’t been really reviewed since 2016 and was causing our current leadership some concerns around making sure people end up in the right spot.
We started with roles/responsibilities in general and then pushed that down into groups that look like the menu itself so that it’s easier for us to make changes based on the location of the menu items. Depending on the specific menu item it required being a little more complex but in general we split out setup folders separate from general operations/report folders.
It took some time to do but does seem to make it more streamlined for users to get to what they are looking for as well as for us to be able to manage requests for “need access to _____” and who needs to approve those requests.
I have just been through the whole process of rationalising our security which had evolved rather than been planned.
The key take away for me is to always have a security for every screen, report and dashboard.
I then uncheck the ‘Allow Access to All Groups/ Users’
It is then just a case of deciding which security group should be assigned to the function.
I use a spreadsheet to keep a record of this which needs to be approved by the relevant department head.
With this approach, the menu structure after that doesn’t matter so much as the security is at the functional level. However, if I could go back to the start I wish we had kept the Epicor standard menus.
I did ask Epicor is there was any way of reverting back to the original menus when we upgraded to Kinetic, hoping there might be a data fix/ script, but alas there wasn’t.
@aclements - I realize this is an old post.
Did you ever get your menu back to the base menu?
One way would be to export the menu structure from the Education database
Using DMT, delete your old menu. (don’t touch the system menus)
Import the menu structure you exported from Education