Best Practices in Laserfiche Security

5 min read
  • Information Technology
  • Information Governance

Contributed by: Connie Anderson, Senior Technical Writer, Laserfiche 

When setting up security, each Laserfiche repository will be different and have different requirements to consider. Without careful planning and regular updates as your site grows and changes, your system may become chaotic and unsecured. To keep this from happening, have the following recommendations in mind when setting up Laserfiche security. 

Four Factors in Implementing Entry Access Rights 

Entry access rights determine the operations that a user can perform on folders or documents. For example, users may be able to read invoices, but not edit or delete them. 

It is a best practice to assign entry access rights to groups rather than individual users. This way, you can simply add users to groups and they will automatically be assigned the correct rights.

  1. Who: Figure out which users need to be in which group.
  • Categorize users into groups:
    • By department. For example, members of the sales department have different rights than members of the accounting department.
    • By role. For example, administrators have different rights than scanner operators.
  • Users can be members of more than one group. In that case, security will be calculated based on the rights assigned to all relevant groups.

This way, if a new person is hired, simply add them to the appropriate group and they will automatically inherit the correct security.

  1. What and how much: Figure out what content needs to be accessed by which group and how much access they should have.

For example, members of the accounting department need to create, read and modify financial statements, but most other departments don’t even need to know where the financial statements are stored.

  • If a user is not granted a right but is also not denied that right, they will not be able to perform the action. However, they can still inherit the ability to perform the action from another group.
  • If a user is denied a right, either on the user itself or via group membership, that deny will take precedence. Even if they have been allowed that right via a different group, they will still not have that right.

In general, it is a best practice to simply not allow a right if a user should not be able to do something, rather than explicitly denying it. Explicit denies should be used primarily for exception cases.

  1. Scope: Apply entry access rights at the broadest level possible while still restricting access in the way that you need.
  • Use the scope “This folder, subfolders and documents” to easily grant or deny access to entire sections of your folder tree. Then restrict access based on which folders you want particular groups to have the ability to access. Example: If you want everyone to have access to everything in the “Human Resources” folder, then assign them the “This folder, subfolders and documents” scope.
  • If you want them to have access to everything except for the folders and documents in the “Annual Review Information” folder, then assign scope to be the “Human Resources” folder and its immediate children.
  • Use the folder tree to organize your security, with certain sections of the tree being accessible to certain groups, and use scope to grant only the appropriate sections to the appropriate groups.
  • Create structures with restricted rights at higher levels and more permissive rights at lower levels of the folder tree.
  1. Where: Simplify granting security by making sure documents with similar security needs are stored in the same folder. We strongly recommend setting security at the folder level rather than at the document level. This helps to ensure that your security settings remain consistent, that new documents are created with appropriate security automatically, and that any security issues you might encounter are easy to troubleshoot.
  • After setting up security on a folder, assuming you’ve considered scope correctly, users will automatically have the appropriate rights to the documents residing in it.

Privileges

Privileges are special account rights that grant the ability to perform operations dealing with the management of a Laserfiche repository. Privileges can be divided among different types of administrators. 

For example, a high-level administrator can be granted Manage Entry Access and Manage Metadata privileges while a department manager will have Manage Templates and Fields and Manage Stamps.

Some privileges have repercussions across the entire repository. For example, a user with the Manage Tags privilege can grant security tags, and a user with the Manage Entry Access privilege can browse the entire repository. The number one rule about privileges is: know what a privilege does before you grant it.

The “Everyone” group

Since all users will always be part of the “Everyone” group, you should give it only very limited security access.

By default, all members of the “Everyone” group are assigned two privileges that confer significant system performance benefits. These privileges allow them to bypass certain security settings:

  • Bypass Filter Expressions
  • Bypass Browse

If you will be using the Folder Filter Expressions advanced security feature, or restricting the Browse right for certain folders, you will need to remove the relevant privilege from the “Everyone” group. Otherwise, it is recommended that you leave these privileges in place.

Other Security Considerations

Security Tags

Since it is a best practice to grant entry access rights to particular folders, not individual documents, if you want to control access to documents regardless of where they are located in the folder tree, you can use security tags. A security tag ensures that only users who have been granted that tag will be able to see documents that have that tag applied to them, regardless of where the document is in the repository. 

Use security tags for documents that:

  • Require more restricted access than other documents in the same folder
  • Are special cases or require special handling
  • Will move through many folders during their life cycle

Security tags will not be inherited by documents in a folder if they are applied to a folder. In general, security tags should be applied only to documents, not to folders.

Feature Rights

Feature rights provide administrators with the ability to enable or disable certain functions for users across the entire repository. For example, the Scan feature right controls a user’s ability to scan documents. If they do not have the Scan feature right on a folder, they will not be able to scan new documents into that folder, even if they have sufficient entry access rights to create documents at that location. Feature rights are best used when you want to simplify a user’s experience by disabling functions across the whole repository. 

Field and Template Access Rights

Laserfiche gives you the ability to configure access to specific parts of your repository, such as the fields, and templates. In general, these access rights have reasonable default values; if you don’t have a reason to need to restrict access to specific fields or templates, you do not need to configure field and template security and can use the default values. However, they are useful for exception cases. For example, you may want to use security to hide sensitive field values, such as social security numbers. 

Want to learn more Laserfiche best practices? Explore the Laserfiche Aspire learning platform. 

  

Watch a 2-Minute Demo

Discover how your organization can go paperless, manage digital content, automate day-to-day processes and more.

WATCH A DEMO
Take a Product Tour

Enable the teams closest to your business processes to evolve and transform how your organization gets things done.

PRODUCT TOUR

Related Blogs

Laserfiche Recognized at the 2024 WealthBriefing European Awards
Congratulations to the Laserfiche Run Smarter® Award Winners
Digitization, AI and the Cloud — Laserfiche Predictions for Government and Education in 2024
Cost-Efficiency, ML and Interoperability — Laserfiche Predictions for Manufacturing and Healthcare in 2024
Hyperautomation, Integrations and AI — Laserfiche Predictions for Financial Services in 2024

Book a Personalized Laserfiche Consultation Today