3.1 Users

The primary purpose of a user account is to store their preferences, rights, mailboxes to which they have access, and authentication information.

Users come from one of two places

There are, however, occasions when you might want someone to search through the Retain archives, but who is not part of the mail system. Such a person might be an independent auditor, a lawyer, a user deleted from the live system, etc.

For this reason, Retain has an offline password system. These passwords are stored in Retain’s control database. Retain does not care how a user authenticates: whether offline, via SOAP for GroupWise, Exchange, or LDAP, the same rights can be assigned. An administrator who possesses the Assign Rights administrative right can assign all pertinent rights.

Users may also be assigned access to more than one mailbox. Offline users will need to be given access to at least one mailbox to perform searches. Users who are assigned “Search All Mailboxes” rights have access to all users’ mailboxes.

GroupWise Proxy support only works for users who authenticate via GroupWise SOAP protocol.

All previously created users are listed and can be edited or removed, by clicking on the user and editing the values, or through clicking on the Remove User button.

When an administrator-level right is granted to a user, that user will see that right in the management console when they log into Retain. If a right that the full Administrator can view is missing from the menu of that user, they are missing that right. To view and have access to that option, they must have the missing right granted to that user. If you have performed an upgrade and are missing options, check for a missing administrator right.

It should be clear from this screen that there is no such thing as an Administrator per se in Retain. Instead, some users simply have more rights to do more things than others. A distinction is made between Administrator level rights (which allow a user global system wide power) and User level rights, but any user can have zero or more rights in either category. The Administrator you created in the setup wizard was simply a user account with all of the Administrator level rights granted by default.

All user level rights are strictly optional, and add functionality. None are needed to access your own mailbox and other mailboxes assigned to you. The "Default" group grants Forwarding, View Attachment, and Printing rights. Note: There is no way to perfectly block printing in a web browser, so using this feature should not be taken as a 100% guarantee that users won’t be able to print. Nonetheless, for most users, it is effective. Rights marked [other mailbox] refers to other mailboxes the user has been granted rights to as explained below for the Mailboxes tab.

Select the mailboxes this user will be able to access in addition to their own. This allows one user to access another user’s mailbox.

Granting Rights to Individual Mailboxes

You may grant rights to some users so they can access just certain mailboxes. For example we can give the facilities manager rights to two of his workers.

In the example above, the user has explicit rights to two mailboxes. These mailboxes can be taken away from the user simply by clicking on the red ‘X’.

Adding users to the list is done using the Address Book selector. In the criteria section, you may enter information to search for a mailbox or a set of mailboxes. The search results will appear in the Address Book section. Each listed entry has a check box you can use to select that mailbox for addition to the list. Once you are done selecting, click Add Selected Items to add those mailboxes to your list of searchable mailboxes.

This interface is utilized in various other areas, but is described here.

It shows the currently selected items at the top, and lets you delete an item by clicking the red X.

(The New Mailbox selector in the Search Interface is an exception; just choose another item)

This tab contains settings that mainly govern the way the Search Interface works for the selected user.

Note that the user can change any of these settings by using the User Options tab in the Search interface.

Retain supports the GroupWise proxy function. To enable it, check the box in the Module Configuration section. (NOTE: using proxy is useless if the user you wish to enable this function for is set to use offline authentication – found under the core settings of the user)

This function is used to enable a user to access the mailbox of another user. For example, if user B grants the right to user A to access their mailbox in the GroupWise client, then user A can “proxy” in to user B’s mailbox.

Much the same way, if user A has proxy rights into user B’s mailbox in GroupWise, and the function is enabled in Retain, then user A may select user B’s mailbox for browsing or may search through user B’s mailbox in the Search Screen.

In Retain, it is the MAIL READ right which grants access.

Retain uses the list of available mailboxes shown in the GroupWise client to determine which mailboxes will be made available to the logged in user (user A in our example). Thus, it is important that user A has logged into user B’s mailbox as proxy using the GroupWise client before doing this in Retain. While user B might have granted the rights to user A, if user A has not yet logged in as proxy to user B’s mailbox with GroupWise, then user B will not appear in user A’s list of available accounts to proxy into.

Retain checks these proxy rights the first time you access a proxy users mailbox, then caches the information for 7 days as configured in the server Configuration – Miscellaneous tab. (Default is 7 days.)

If you have access to another mailbox by virtue of GroupWise proxy, then you will see that mailbox appear in the mailbox selector in the search screen or you may search through that mailbox as well.