Setting up Security Levels for Resources

When you first set up your Resources (the people in your organization who will use the tool), you need to give some thought to how they will interact with the documents you plan to store in the document repository. Every resource has a security level. The higher the level, the more documents that resource can see (with a few special exceptions). Normally then, the top management would have security levels higher than entry-level personnel.

You control level 11 through 98. (Levels 0-10, 99, 100 and 101 have special functionality built it and must be used as designed. See Exact's Customer portal document 15.567.559 for the basic explanation of levels.

I'd suggest you diagram out your "management levels". If you have an organizational chart that should help identify how "flat" or " "hierarchical" your organization is. Then assign security levels to each major tier. Leave several numbers between each tier for gradations within that tier and for changes in the structure.

Here's an example:
Top Management (Exec VP, President, CFO etc) = level 30
Vice Presidential = level 25
Director = level 20
Manager = level 15
Supervisor = level 13
General = level 10

Document Taxonomies

One of the first real struggles I had with Synergy was to try to set up a robust “taxonomy” (or classification system) for documents.. In one respect it’s not critical, as you can move documents fairly easily from one category to another. But the more documents that you have in the repository, the more work it will be. I did a small study of knowledge management to get ideas. Here’s one article that might help.

One of the reasons it is difficult to set something up for the entire Enterprise is that not everyone thinks like everyone else (or at least they don’t necessarily think like I do). So it’s important to talk to the intended users of the system to find out how they currently store documents and how they retrieve them. Most organizations today, unless they already have a formal document storage system, use their PC and network resources to store documents. So here’s where I went to look first:

Shared drives on the network – this is usually the biggest source of information
Shared folders in Outlook
Local drives
Intranet (if they have one)
Public web site
Outlook personal folders
Any existing software system that stores conversations, notes, etc

When I interviewed folks the vast majority were more than willing to help and willing to give up their “private stash” of information to help themselves and others.