Hi, I am Denys van Kempen, SAP Partner Innovation Lab and the SAP HANA Academy.
In this video tutorial series we are going to cover security topics for SAP Analytics
Cloud starting with user management and automation.
This video was recorded in September 2021; for the latest video tutorials on the topic,
please check the playlist.
As administrator, you will be familiar with security management in Analytics Cloud to
add users, assign roles, create teams, and so on.
Obviously, beyond a handful of users, this is no longer very practical, and we can use
the import Users from File functiality to point to a comma-separated CSV file containing
a list of users.
Support for user import from Active Directory was removed back in July 2019, which is why
this menu item is no longer active (and it may no longer show up at all by the
time you are watching this).
Adding users with a file is nice, but if we than have to add the users to teams and roles
using our mouse is still going to be a bit tedious,
so for enterprise use cases, anything at scale, SAP Analytics Cloud has an made an API available,
the User and Team Provisioning API, which enables use to perform all of these
tasks programatically.
You can find the openAPI or swagger specification here on the SAP API Business Hub.
In the upcoming videos, we are going to show you excactly how this works
but for now, lets start with the basics and use the interface of Analytics Cloud to create
users, team, and add authorisations.
We will go through this quickly, just a simple setup.
I have created three users: two employees and a manager; two teams: students and teachers;
and two custom roles, with the student team added to the student role and the teacher
team added to the teacher role; and then we can define the access level, the authorisations,
for each team, in each model.
OK, now to create this very basic security model with three users and two teams already
required a fair number of clicks, So, let’s see how we can improve this a
bit with the file import feature.
To start from scratch, let’s first remove our users.
First the students, then the managers, otherwise we get an error.
Here we our CSV file.
At a minimum, we need to provide ID, surname, and email but we can provide a lot more information
as well which, if we select our user account here, corresponds to some of the user preferences
under profile settings.
Select import users from file.
Select source file.
Select create mapping.
Set the delimiter to semi-colon, the file is now parsed correctly and then we can map
the columns of the CSV file with the corresponding Analytics Cloud parameters
Again, a fair number of clicks.
Fast forward OK
Import Very well
If we have 10s or 100s of users, this significantly improves the onboarding.
Of course, we still need to get the data into a CSV file but this scenario assumes you have
a user directory where you can export users from
However, what’s missing
is the team assignment If we want to implement the best practice
add users to teams, and teams to roles, to manage privileges
we still need to manually add the users to teams
Import CSV allows us to assign roles to users but not teams to users
OK In the next video, we will show you how we
can automate the entire onboaring process with the user and team provisioning API.
See the description below for more information.
Don’t forget to subscribe.
Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy / Partner Innovation Lab
Thanks for watching.