Best Practice - handling Common User Accounts

Hi @KUNGTOM ,

IFSAPP account is the schema owner account and hence should not be shared among users or used as a typical end user account. See below extract from  F1 doc: 

The best practice would be to use the IFSAPP account to create user accounts and segregate them according to your requirement. 

Using an end user account a shared account can be tricky and difficult to track. The following threads discuss the details on tracking end user account login times: 

See User Login Record | IFS Community

Last Login for user | IFS Community

Also, to track end user activity, it is possible to use history logging. You should be able to find some threads in the community. Here’s a couple from a quick search I did: 

History Logging on Custom LUs | IFS Community

Viewing History Log records of all users without granting FND_ADMIN permission | IFS Community

Thanks,

Kasun

Hi Kasun,
Thank you for your answer. I am aware that IFSAPP should not be used by End Users. That is not the case here. We use two IFS-consultants (employees of IFS Sweden) for those changes we need to do and can’t manage ourselves. I am pretty sure that we are not alone here in letting more than one person use IFSAPP. According to my experience, there is a lot of companies letting their consultants use the IFSAPP for full access when necessary. 

I have earlier worked with a company where we only let the consultants use IFSAPP after getting permission from us. That way we could see if it was used any time without permission. This was a rule that worked fine for them. In my case there isn’t enough. We need to make sure no one can use the account without some kind of traceability...

Hi @KUNGTOM ,

I agree with you that, may IFS customers are sharing app owner account with their outside IFS consultants, which is very easy and efficient with their work handling. But, almost all IFS customers have restricted access to their IFS apps from external network. So, external parties are provided with a VPN account/accounts to connect to the IFS application through the internal network. So, I think it is possible to track from which VPN account / IP address, the system has been accessed and what date/time. I don’t know exactly, because I’m not familiar with that process, but I think it should be possible.

And, another thing some customers practice is that, they don’t share the app owner account of the production system, but that of the test systems. And I know some customers daily copy the production system to their test systems. So, when an investigation needed for a specific problem, consultants can investigate it in the test system,so the same solution can be applied in the prod by the internal IFS admin. For any developments, consultants/developers can develop the solution in the test system, and then the customer can export it and import/apply it in prod.

And, also, even though we have not an option to directly clone the app owner account to create a similar account, a super user account/accounts with same privileges can be created, so that those accounts can be used separately by the consultants. I think, the standard permission set FND_ADMIN has almost all access/privileges app owner has. (Some other type of access other than permissions, also need to be configured like HR access, document access, finance user groups etc..)

As @ShawnBerk and @Kasun Balasooriya mentioned, you can user history logging and user logging tracing options to track the changes/logging done by different users using app owner, if it is shared.

Thanks,