Adding users and groups, and provisioning these objects within Shared Services is a relatively simple process. Once you log into Shared Services for the first time, the steps are very straightforward. The challenge I will address in this post is adding a large number of users or groups to Shared Services. If you work in a large environment with users numbering in the hundreds, this is a very real issue. Adding users one at a time within the Shared Services console would be enough to drive an Oracle administrator nearly insane.
If you are working with Active Directory, there are tools to assist with user and group maintenance that fall outside of the scope of Hyperion specifically. There is other information on the web related to Active Directory in general and thus I will not cover that topic in this post.
If you are working with Native security in Oracle EPM 11.1.2.x, read on. You will notice that the previously available tool “CSSExportImport” is no longer available. This leaves you without a command line tool for creating large amounts of users and groups, as well as modifying provisioning for users and groups. With 11.1.2.x, we will use Lifecycle Management to modify Native Security. In this example, we will add 400+ users to a single Native group that we have provisioned to Hyperion Planning. Note that you can also create users and groups as well as provision using this process.
Here is a screen shot of our group beforehand… zero users are in the group.
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To add users to a group in Shared Services, navigate first to the Project containing “Shared Services”. In this example, we’ve name the Project “Foundation”.
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Once “Shared Services” has been selected, a list of objects appears on the right hand side of the screen. Drill into “Native Directory” and locate “Groups”.
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Right click on “Groups” and select “Export for Edit”.
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Save the file to your PC and open it in an editor of some type. Excel is used in this example.
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Locate a section titled “#group_children”. This defines the members of a group. Copy the first two rows and paste them below in order to create a new section. This copy/paste step is only necessary if you are adding users to a group that does not contain any preexisting users. If you are modifying a group that already contains users, find the “#group_children” section that lists the group you intend to modify.
Copy/paste is shown below:
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Once you have created the new section, insert a blank row for each user. Paste the group name in the “id” column and the list of user IDs in the “user_id” column. You will also need to reference the provider (in the example environment, Native Directory or AD) so Shared Services knows exactly where to look for the user ID you have listed. Once you are finished, it should look something like the following screen shot.
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Save the file, retaining the “CSV” format. Navigate back to the “Shared Services” node where we previously exported the “Groups” file. This time, right click on “Groups” and select “Import after Edit”.
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Locate the file using the Browse button and click Finish to load into Shared Services.
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The following screen will be shown as the file is loaded:
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Once the load is complete, we can open the group in Shared Services and see the ~400 users have been added successfully. Names have been removed from this example.
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As you can see, the process is much quicker and easier than using the Shared Services console to make the changes manually. Using LCM in this manner will likely result in substantial savings of time.
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