Question

Feature Request: Having a separate "Move Entry" Access Right

Laserfiche Ideas

Updated August 20, 2020

asked on March 19, 2014 • Show version history

A Access Right for allowing or denying the movement of documents or folders inside a Parent Folder. Currently the movement of documents or folders is restricted by the Create Document and Create Folder access rights. This however has its own limitations and makes it difficult to achieve the desired result. The use case is as follows:

A User has their Own Folder based on their name and this folder contains 2 Child Folders, examples “*To Capture” and “To Process”

The “*To Capture” folder has access rights to Create documents and also the Delete Access rights for pages and Documents, and is used when a user snapshots or imports a document into LF. The delete right is specifically only given to this folder to allow the user to delete the document if quality is poor. This avoids poor quality documents from being submitted in a workflow process. Business Rules are also setup to only start if the document Path is in *To Capture.

Once a workflow is active on a document and it is routed between users, it is moved to the “To Process” folder. On this folder the Create Document right is not granted to the user to avoid them from importing or creating documents directly to this folder. They do however have the right to Create Folders, which they can then create their own working environment for moving documents into for instance a Pending Query folder, while they wait for external feedback.

The problem currently is that users cannot move documents around in the To Process folder tree as it requires the Create Document access right. So it would be useful to separate Create and Move rights, granting the ability to move documents around in a specified folder tree, but not create new documents in that structure other than through Workflow. And then similarly to Deny access to move documents into a certain folder. For instance to be able to Create a Document in the *To Capture folder but to Deny documents from being moved to the Folder, as the access in that folder allows users to Delete documents.

I also found that if the Modify Contents Access right allows for users to move documents into folders where the Create Document access right is granted. The help file refers to this access right granting the ability to move pages into different entries, which I assume it simply sees the folder as being another entry to move a documents of pages to. By having a Access right for move alone, then one can define the structure a bit more securely for allowing only the relevant actions that a group or specified user requires.

3 0

Replies

replied on March 19, 2014 • Show version history

Your feature request makes sense given the way you've architected your process. Let me please challenge 'your' design:

> Creating folder structures to reflect the status of a document (that is, «Under review», «Review completed» and «To be processed») introduces complexity as well depicted in this post

> Moving documents as you suggest also introduce complexity from a workflow point of view as starting rules must be adapted to include/exclude one folder and/or another

> Forcing users to browse over the folders to retrieve (for instance) the status of a document is cumbersome

Personnally, I use a combination of fields & tags to reflect the status of documents so users can search/filter documents within a single folder.

If you eventually swith to a business process to achieve 'your' scenario, the location will also become secondary as you focus primarily on the audience and the status of documents.

0 0

replied on March 19, 2014

Having a flat folder structure and using fields vs. a folder structure that reflects the status' is a style thing, but we generally use a combination of both. Put the proper fields on a document to enable search, and at the same time use a folder structure that allows browsing in order to facilitate users who are more comfortable with that concept.

Using Business Processes is a must. When losing documents is a big deal, allowing users to move them around and create folders will be problematic as you attempt to keep them from doing damage. We have one workflow that has an "I'm working on this" field. If they set that, it creates a working folder for them and puts the document in there. The end results is that users have a very small set of permissions and Workflow does the actual work. This increases the reliability of the system, as well as user confidence.

0 0

replied on March 19, 2014

Thank you for your post. I understand your view on this and we have other processes that indeed work this way. For certain processes, it is however not possible.

For this particular process the Users work out of their Working folders every single day and process on average 2500 documents between 3 different departments totaling 22 users. Workflow is active on the documents and routes the documents between each user to their Respective To Process folders. 70% of the documents are processed immediate and steps onto either the next person or next stage in the process. for the 30% these might be different types of Queries that they need to get resolved first and can take any time from 2 days to 45 days and the list of different Query types is to long to try and cater for each query type in a field value.

Because workflow is already active on the document there is no need to be concerned about starting rules because of moving documents. The structure is meant to be giving the user the illusion of doing things they used to be able to do while working with paper and has worked well for the past 3 years.

The complexity came in when we now enabled the option to start the workflow as a business process when the users themselves snapshot documents in to LF as opposed to sending it to the scanning department that handle bulk of the document input. To avoid them starting a duplicate workflow on a document that already has a running workflow, we configured the rule of the BP to only start while in the *To Capture folder. it can be seen as the users own Incoming folder. due to some of the quality of the documents, at times the snapshot image quality is not good enough to accept the document for processing, and to not then send this poor quality document into a workflow, they then have the option to delete. but only on documents inside the To Capture folder. Once a workflow is started on the document, it is moved out from the To Capture folder.

So now the only way to restrict the user from manually moving the document out from To Capture to any of their other folders is to remove the Create Entry Access from that folders, but then they cannot move the Query ones like they need to.

as for keeping metadata for searching, we have covered that, but the problem here is not searching and finding the documents.

0 0

replied on August 20, 2020

We have a similar problem in reverse. We want users to be able to delete documents if they are scanning or snapshotting and make an error, but once they move a document out of the work area, they should not be able to delete it. So we use folders for that - but the problem is one user has been known to move a document from the storage folder back to the work folder just to delete it, which breaks the policy and security we have set up. I can't restrict MOVE for that user without taking away their ability to move it from work folder to storage folder. For now I'm just taking away delete from all folders for this user. But I agree, some way to limit Move Into and Move Out Of a folder would be very handy in this case.

0 0

You are not allowed to follow up in this post.

Question

Question

Feature Request: Having a separate "Move Entry" Access Right

Replies

Sign in to reply to this post.