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[Ian Ray]

Hello all,

What are some considerations for why a company would use the standard NAV 2016+ permission setup methods or purchase and configure Easy Security?

Any input would be appreciated. I am trying to figure out both why a company would want to use Easy Security and why a company would not want to use Easy Security.

Thank you,

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Ian Ray
Cypress Grove
Arcata CA
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[Naveen Jain]

Standard NAV does not allow field level security. It only allows Table level security. If wants to control users on the field level, then you need Add-on called Easy Security. Easy Security allows you to disable or hide fields based on the setup

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Naveen Jain
Director of IT
Symbex Companies
Santa Fe Springs CA
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[Doug Huras]

Easy Security also allows “recording” of a process in NAV.  A very simple example would be posting a sales order, but it could be much more including which tabs and buttons are clicked, and then using that “recording” to generate a “role” for a permission set to be used by standard NAV security.  It is a bit of an involved processes though.

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Doug Huras
Senior Software Developer
Home Hardware Stores Limited
St Jacobs ON
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[Greg Enns]

I think  has?? pointed out the biggest benefit of Easy Security. I can’t imagine trying to implement security controls without Field-level security. Being able to hide/lock specific fields, but still give the user Modify permissions on a table is very valuable. And if you have any issues, Easy Security support staff are fast and very helpful and their documentation on the web is excellent.
The only downside I suppose is that it adds a lot of customization into your page objects. But even that should be easy to work with in a 3-way merge. We’ve used EasySecurity in NAV 2009 R2 and now with NAV2016. I highly recommend it!

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Greg Enns
ERP Coordinator
Technical Prospects
Kaukauna WI
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[Mathew Ealy]

I have used both and would be willing to answer any specific questions you had. To give you some insight in to why we did it.

We first migrated from another system to Nav 09, we used standard security. Because of a crunched time frame of the cut over limited knowledge of how the system worked and a lot of job overlap our partner created a permission set with all permissions except HR functions for all users.  As you can imagine this made setting up users very simple, but securing data very difficult, we had users changing customer/item/vendor numbers renaming an items, customers, vendors. New customers built with no data, and just a total lack of data integrity. 

Soon after we started looking at ways to prevent this and came across easy security. Talking with other partners we found some don’t even give the customer a choice they bundle easy security in as part of their standard installation. When it came time to migrate to 2016 we started out understanding we would use easy security.

When we installed easy security we built job functions as permission sets and then rolled those up in to departments.  Starting out we only used the table level security. We didn’t implement field level  security until after we had gone live and our IT team was able to roll it out more consistently.

Our cut over from Nav 09 to Nav 16 was very easy since we could just back up permissions from test to live in minutes rather than rebuilding them again. 

In all I found easy security even when not using Field level security to be much easier to use and saved our IT team lots of time in set up and on-boarding new staff.

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Mathew Ealy
Nav Support Specialist
Rentokil N. America
Reading PA
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[Ian Ray]

Thank you all for the input.

? pointed out the heart of what I was getting at. Since NAV 2016+ allows for fairly simple permission recording and allows for groups, some of the advantages of Easy Security for NAV 2013+ were eliminated. Recording is, imho, much easier with the 2016 method. But, NAV still doesn’t have all the “FLADS” capabilities of Easy Security. Being able to set fields to hide or read-only is currently an advantage of Easy Security.

I suppose my question doesn’t really have a good answer. I was wondering if anyone could identify any specific variables about a business that would make Easy Security a “must have” or those which would make it overkill.

??

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Ian Ray
Cypress Grove
Arcata CA
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[Ramin Marghi]

Hello Ian,

Quite an opportune moment to chime in — I’ve done a few Easy Security upgrades recently and the past few versions of NAV have killed a lot of the Easy Security benefits.

A few key differentiators of Easy Security:

1. Easy Security has an expiry date function on permissions — so you can, in advance, set Bob the A/R Clerk up with some A/P permissions while Suzy is away and have those permissions automatically lapse on her return date.

2. Easy Security has a publishing function — what I mean by this is that you can sandbox permissions and build and tweak before having them take effect. In base NAV, once you make a change it takes effect immediately.

3. Easy Security has versioning — what I mean is that it has “Restore Points” for the changes implemented.

4. Easy Security does not have Security Filter support — base NAV supports setting a “Security Filter” on TableData. Easy Security disables this capability (presumably to push FLADS instead).

5. Easy Security has some base “SoX-compliant” Permission Sets. If this is a need, it has a good chunk of canned recordings and permission sets.

6. Easy Security boasts field-level and data security (FLADS) — I would not consider this until and unless there is a decent chunk of field-level security you need. If it’s a few fields here and there, it’s a lot easier just to handle that with some custom extensions.

Having said that, the canned Permissions often are lacking a ton of objects (for North America, anyway) for the more recent versions, so it’s not truly “plug and play”. Also, it’s a lot more overhead to maintain (typically involves creating a new “Easy Security” company and have to “update and publish” a whole lot).

Note that “Easy Security” is an oxymoron — I strongly recommend leaning heavily on base NAV permissions and only considering an add-on if any of the above are game-changers for your permissions project.

Hope that helps!

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Ramin Marghi , CPA, CGA
CPA, CGA | ERP Consultant
Catapult ERP
VANCOUVER BC
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