Nfield unveiled: User Access Management

Together with a selection of our customers NIPO Software continuously evaluates the possibilities of our data collection system, and looks at what to keep and where to improve. The lessons learned are also applied in the design of Nfield: our new data collection suite. In this newsletter we lift the veil on Nfield User Access Management.

One of the recognised improvement areas of Nfield versus the current NIPO Fieldwork System or NIPO CAPI system is the ability to control the level of access users have to surveys and overviews. Next to this our customers suggested that it would also be very useful if the software would show only functionality relevant to the tasks a user is allowed to perform, in stead of showing greyed out functionality.

In Nfield we address both of these wishes by implementing an extensive permission structure that drives what users are able to do and see in Nfield. Every Nfield function has a permission that allows it to be turned on or off. Similar permissions also exist on surveys, fieldwork centres, users, and etcetera. These permissions can be grouped in profiles that drive user access in Nfield.

In order to control access management in Nfield, the suite includes a very flexible setup to create meaningful user groups. This can be job based (like research executive or script writer) or business based (like automotive or healthcare) or based on any other grouping that is relevant for your organisation.

By combining users, user groups, and permission profiles you create a detailed user permission structure that controls the access of each Nfield user to surveys, functions, fieldwork reports, and etcetera. This gives your users precisely the level of access they need, for example:

• You can allow supervisors in fieldwork location A to see only the interviewers of location A; or
• You can allow the researchers of automotive to look at the fieldwork progress of the automotive surveys but not those of other departments; or
• You can allow senior script writers make changes in how the data of an already started survey is stored, while junior script writers are not allowed to do so.

The access method used in Nfield also allows you to determine if a user is logging in from inside or outside your LAN network. This makes it possible to give the same user different permissions if he is logging in from outside the LAN network.

All these features should make sure that you can build an access method and security level that fits your operational needs without security getting in the way of doing your day to day business.

So far for this newsitem. There is much more to we can tell about User Access Management in Nfield but space here is limited. Please contact NIPO Software Product Management or your sales representative at NIPO Software if you want to learn more about Nfield.