Appian security, basic user, Appian Designer.

Question

Hi, 
 I would like to restrict a user (Business User) to access only site access using site menus. At the same time, I would like to restrict business user to "Appian Designer". 
 How can I achieve this. Any suggestions please. 
 Thanks in advance.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

swapnar6405 said: restrict a user (Business User) to access only site access using site menus 
 A user would be able to access any Sites for which they have Viewership visibility. Sites they have visibility into would populate in the site menu. What are you seeing that's different? Is there any other detail you can provide to help us figure out what you're after? 
 
 swapnar6405 said: I would like to restrict business user to "Appian Designer". 
 I don't really understand what you mean by this. Is "business user" the same one as mentioned in the first use case, or is this something separate? Do you mean you'd have someone who can see Designer but doesn't have access to any Sites? Generally speaking this would not usually happen since someone with Designer access will have at least enough visibility to see the back-end and objects (including the Site design/config objects), which would inherently give them access to go to the front-end versions of those Sites as well. Again, can you clarify exactly what you're after here, and how it differs from what your users are currently able to do?

Mike Schmitt · Answer

Similar answer to Stefan's - basically you only grant Designer access as-needed. Often, the designers in an environment (at least in Dev environments) will get Admin accounts, but this isn't always necessary or appropriate - in those cases they'd just go in the Designers group (as mentioned). 
 For individual Sites, for ease of maintenance and visibility sake, I like to make individual "Viewers Group" groups for each Site - these would be meta-groups only (generally not user-facing), and in usual production use would mainly consist of other groups (role-specific groups that are meaningful to end users where a user may be in one or more such group depending on their role(s) within the Appian Application context). 
 Each site will then (at least) have Visibility granted to its "Viewers Group", and these groups can then also be used in the User Start Pages configuration page in the Admin Console if desired (IMHO it's much better than a clumsy default approach i've seen used before, where certain site-specific user start pages will be assigned to a variety of groups that were manually set; this makes troubleshooting unnecessarily cumbersome).

Mike Schmitt · Answer

"Designers" is an Appian Group, which you would add or remove users from like with any other group. This has nothing to do with the User Type (a boolean flag indicating between System Administrator / Basic User).

Mike Schmitt · Answer

You can just navigate to the group and add users to it, the way you'd add users to any Appian group. If you're unsure where to find the group itself, navigate to the "Objects" tab in /Design , filter to "Groups", then search "Designers".