You can manage user accounts and groups in Rational® DOORS®, or you can use the Rational Directory Server. Whichever solution you choose, take time to plan your user accounts and the naming conventions you want to use for users and groups. If naming conventions are followed consistently, it is easier to manage users and groups, and to manage access controls on data.
Usually, it is best to set up a separate account for each user of your Rational DOORS database. Do not allow different people to share the same user name, or you will not know who made what changes to your data. If a user must modify data, create an account for them, even if they only need it for a few days.
An exception to this rule is if you want to set up a guest account for people who need short-term, read-only access to your data.
Setting up access rights for individual users can be time-consuming. Use groups to save time when you set up access rights for your data.
Bear in mind that each user can be in several groups. There is no limit to the number of groups you can have, or the number of groups that each user can be in.
Naming conventions
Although you can change a user name at any time, Rational DOORS does not record this information. For example, if you change a user name from John to John Smith, you cannot tell whether John Smith is a brand new user or an existing user whose user name has changed.
When planning user names and group names, bear in mind these points:
- Each user name and group name must be unique.
- User names and group names can contain alphanumeric characters (letters of the alphabet and numbers), space characters, and punctuation characters.
- User names and group names are case-sensitive. The names Test Boston and TEST Boston are different.
- User names are used throughout Rational DOORS to identify users, for example in access rights lists and history records. Using the given name of the user as their user name makes it easy to identify them. For example, the user name John Smith (UK Sales) is less ambiguous than John.
- All Rational DOORS screens that list user names and group names list them in alphabetic order. Users are listed together first, and then groups are listed. Think about how you want names to be listed in your database. For example, if you have groups called Tokyo Engineering, Tokyo Test, Boston Engineering, and Boston Test, the Tokyo groups are listed together and the Boston groups are listed together. If you would rather see all the Engineering groups together, call your groups Engineering Boston and Engineering Tokyo.
- Unless the database is configured to use system user names, users must remember their user name and type it when they log in to Rational DOORS.