Server Security

Access to dashboards on ADVIZOR Server AE is managed through the security capabilities built into Micorosft IIS and ASP.Net. Options are:

1. Anonymous access, which means anyone can access the dashboard if they know its URL. This is how ADVIZOR Server AE is configured by default.

2. Access to the entire ADVIZOR Server AE application can be managed. Windows Authentication access requires that the user log into a domain recognized by the server. The user then must be authorized (on an individual or group basis) to access ADVIZOR Server AE.

3. Access to individual projects or a subset of the data in a project can be controlled; this is discussed under Credential Based Filtering.

4. You could provide your own, custom authentication scheme to an entire dashboard.

Managing Access to Dashboards

ADVIZOR Analyst is used to create and publish dashboards to ADVIZOR Server AE. When publishing, you are prompted for a destination for the dashboard.

Dashboards are placed under subfolders of the Projects folder of the ADV virtual directory on the ADVIZOR Server AE machine. Thus, when prompted for a destination, you are shown all subfolders of the Projects folder on your server. By default, these are folders located under C:\Program Files\Advizor Solutions\ADVIZOR Server AE\Projects. A default installation of ADVIZOR Server AE is created with one subfolder in this directory named Demo. You can create additional project folders by manually adding new folders under the Projects folder on your server machine.

We recommend you publish your ADVIZOR dashboards into logical groupings (subfolders) that reflect the role or intended access rights as much as possible. For example, suppose you have three marketing managers, each responsible for a specific region (East, Central and West), and a marketing VP that oversees the managers. In this case, a suggested folder structure is:

Restricting Access with Windows Authentication

By default, ADVIZOR Server AE is configured to allow anonymous access. You can restrict access to ADVIZOR Server AE using Windows Authentication by taking the following steps.

1. Go to C:\Program Files\Advizor Solutions\ADVIZOR Server AE and open the web.config file in a text editor.

2. Adjust the XML comment ending sequence (-->) by moving it from the end of the first line after <bindings>:

   <!-- Use these bindings for http protocol anonymous access -->

   down about 18 lines to the end of the next </customBinding> line:

   </customBinding> -->

3. Reverse this process for the section between

   <!-- Use these bindings for http protocol Windows authentication access

   and

   </customBinding> -->

4. Save changes to web.config and close the text editor.

5. In IIS Manager, enable Windows Authentication for the ADV application.

Access rights defined in web.config apply to all project files.

Restricting Access using Custom Authentication

Since ADVIZOR Server AE is an ASP.NET application, you can leverage the security capabilities built into the ASP.NET platform to build your own security mechanism and integrate it into an ADVIZOR Server AE installation. This allows you to integrate into an existing environment where access rights might be kept in a central repository as part of a single sign-on environment. In that case, you could provide the logic to check access rights (in addition to doing the authentication) and based on results relay to ASP.NET whether to display the requested page or deny access.

For details on using custom authentication, you can search the online Microsoft Knowledge Base (http://support.microsoft.com/) on the phrase “Forms Authentication”, or various books covering ASP.NET 1.1 by publishers such as Microsoft Press, O’Reilly & Associates, or Wrox Press.