Introducing Access Control by OU for FlashPanel

As many of you probably know, last week marked a huge milestone for BetterCloud – FlashPanel graduated from beta. This was an event 14 months in the making and it took some serious effort from our team and support from our customers, partners and the community to get here.

Last week’s release included a number of big changes, including the integration of our billing system into FlashPanel. This system automates the purchasing process and provides for a seamless experience for our customers. We also added a highly anticipated feature, especially among our larger customers. FlashPanel administrators now have the ability to set up Access Control roles by organizational unit.

If you’ve been using FlashPanel for a while and / or you’re part of a larger organization, Access Control is probably a feature you’ve grown very familiar with. We’ve found the feature comes in handy when a Super Administrator wants to grant only certain permissions to a user. Say you want a help desk employee to manage password resets or you need your marketing manager to take over email signatures, simply set up an Access Control role in FlashPanel.

However, until now, Access Control roles have lacked certain granularity. While you can set granular permission-level controls, any permissions granted span to cover the entire domain – in other words, the scope of these roles has been extremely wide. But now, with Access Control by OU, Super Administrators can grant certain permissions to a user or group over a specific OU within the domain.

Some use cases include:

1. Granting Access Control roles to IT administrators by office / location
2. Training a new admin on FlashPanel: By granting only limited access to FlashPanel’s vast functionality, new IT staff are given only limited management and security capabilities, which reduces issues and management mishaps.
3. Limiting Access to exclude control over the Super Admin OU: Prior to Access Control by OU, Access Control roles enabled a user to act on their given role for anyone in the entire organization – Super Administrators included. For example, if you gave a help desk employee Access Control to reset passwords, that employee could effectively reset the passwords of Super Admins. Now, with Access Control by OU, you can grant roles to apply to every single org. unit except the Super Admin OU.

To explore and set up Access Control roles by OU, follow these step by step instructions below.

First things first, head to FlashPanel’s homepage and click on Settings > Access Control.

Next, click Create on the Access Control homepage.

Enter the name of the Access Control role and a brief description if you so choose.

Click Continue and select the users to whom you’d like to assign the role.

Hit Continue, select the radio button labeled Restricted by Org Unit, then choose the desired OU. (*Note: You can also select Domain wide access to give a user organization-wide permissions).

Next, scroll to the bottom of the page to select the permissions you’d like to grant. You can either choose to Select All or select only a few items. In this case, we’ve only granted access to control Email Signatures.

Again, click Continue to move onto step 4, where you’ll review and apply the Access Control by OU.

You can then head back to the Access Control homepage to view the newly created role.

Finally, instruct the assigned user to access their new role through FlashPanel. First, they should sign into FlashPanel via the More drop down menu in their inbox, then they can hover over End User, where they’ll be able to view and click into their assigned role.

Once in their assigned Access Control role by OU, they’ll have a very limited view of the features in FlashPanel. In this case, the user can only see and control Email Signatures found through the Tools drop down menu.

For more on Access Control by OU, visit the BetterCloud Help Center here.