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Copy user privileges from a current user to a new user

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11-02-2023 08:51 AM
Status: Open
Daniel_Marsh
Emerging Contributor

I am the GIS admin for a medium size city.  In our engineering department I have a user (User 1) whose privileges are all setup correctly on the necessary feature datasets.  Another user (User 2) was hired on who needs the exact same privileges on the same datasets.  There isn't a tool to copy one user's permissions to another user. 

The process I have to use is to check every dataset that User 1 has access to, check their permissions, write it down, and then manually assign those same permissions to User 2.  One small help is to use the geoprocessing tool 'Change Privileges' where you can select multiple datasets and set a blanket 'view' or 'change' privilege on the datasets. 

It would be great if there was a tool called 'Copy Privileges' where you could input a source user, then a destination user and it would then copy the dataset privileges from User 1 to User 2.  Additional functionality that would be great is if after selecting the source user, the datasets the user already have could be displayed with the option to remove any that User 2 might not need.  Additionally an option to overwrite or skip any privileges User 2 may already have.  That would be great for users transferring from one department to another (water department to electrical or planning to engineering).

2 Comments
MarceloMarques

Hello @Daniel_Marsh 

You can solve this problem if you implement database roles.

Then you grant the privileges to the roles and then you assign the roles to the users.

You can learn more about this in my community.esri.com blog below.

Mapping and Charting Solutions (MCS) Enterprise Databases Best Practices

Read the production mapping database guide books, the database template scripts also have detailed examples for advanced rdbms & geodatabase administrators.

Note, the database administrator can query the database data dictionary to retrieve the list of privileges granted to a user or granted to roles. I recommend to not grant permissions direct to users and instead use roles. You can create the role, grant the privileges to the role, grant the role to the users and then revoke the privileges granted direct to the user, this way when you refresh the permission for the role all users that have the role assigned will automatically get the new privileges once they disconnect and reconnect. 

I hope this clarifies your question.

| Marcelo Marques | Principal Product Engineer | Esri |
| Cloud & Database Administrator | OCP - Oracle Certified Professional |
“ I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. ” - Isaac Asimov

Daniel_Marsh

Hi Marcelo, thank you for the reply.  Using roles isn't something I really know about, I'm still fairly new to this position and to ArcGIS.  Thank you for the link, I'm going to read up on it and see how I can implement it.