View Effective Rights Extension

In working with Project Server 2002 and 2003 it has been common to wonder if a given user had rights on a given project. To figure it out you had to have knowledge of the user's membership in groups and those groups affiliation with security categories. Once you had that down you needed to know if the user was associated with the project in some way. The hard part was that it was not immediately obvious which users were managers of each project. It was often a challenge.

The View Effective Rights tool adds an asp page to the Admin section of Project Web Access that allows an administrator to specify a user and find out what projects they have access to and what permissions they have been granted on those projects. This is an invaluable tool when trying to verify the validity of a security scheme in Project Server. There are many ways to setup security and it was always trial and error. This tool makes it much easier to figure out who can do what to which projects.

I just got a chance to play with it a bit earlier today so Im not 100% sure but it also seems that it will let you specify a project and see which users have access to it. Likewise it appears that one can specify a resource and see which other users have rights to view or modify information about that resource. I will check on this and report back. But in the mean time check out the extension for yourself.

MY MISTAKE. THE EXTENSION WILL LET YOU CHECK ON A USERS RIGHTS IN SEVERAL WAYS BUT WILL NOT LET YOU SPECIFY A PROJECT AND SEE WHICH USERS HAVE RIGHTS. THE TOOL IS USER CENTRIC. BUT DONT GET ME WRONG. THIS IS STILL VERY COOL STUFF. :-)

View Effective Rights Tool

The installation looks daunting at first glance but it really is pretty easy. You have to copy an ASP page into a folder, register a dll and copy a reg file into the registry. Don't let your first reaction to the install to stop you. This is a very cool tool that you WILL use as an administrator of Project Server.

Comments

[John Ibrahimi]

I have installed this tool successfully but when I try to view anything, the results is just empty. I've tried all the available options but to no avail. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

[Nogol]

I installed this tool a while ago on our production server. I see the link on PWA but right when I click on the link, it shows me nothing but a blank page. Do you know what the problem might be? Your help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Nogol