In this training, we will cover the basics of how to administer Content Central including adding users & groups and configuring security, an overview of how catalogs and document types work, basic troubleshooting and disaster recovery.
Users who have been configured as a Content Central administrator login the same way as other users. After logging in, however, in the main menu bar an additional button the admin button will be present. This button brings up the admin menu where you can perform most of the administrative tasks for Content Central. When you access the Content Central help from the admin menu, the full administrator’s guide is available in PDF or HTML. You can change wystem wide settings by clicking on system settings.
The settings affect the entire system and apply for all users. For instance, to change the number of rows that Content Central displays in the results grid from 50 to 100, expand the grid results settings area and change the number from 50 to 100. To review or change the email settings that Content Central uses to send outbound email notifications, expand the email server settings area and make your changes.
Some administrators like to configure Content Central so that users cannot remain logged in after 15 minutes of inactivity. This option can be disabled under the “remember login” settings area. Some administrators like to configure the settings for PDF electronic capture so that Content Central always converts PDFs that has been electronically uploaded to fully searchable PDFs. To do this, expand the PDF electronic capture settings area and uncheck the other two options. Changes in this area take effect as soon as you click the “apply” button. To learn more about other system settings, be sure to click on the “help” button.
From the admin menu, you can add users to the system by going to the user’s screen to add a new user. Click the “add user” button and provide a username and password. You may also want to provide more information, like an email address, so that the user can get notifications from Content Central in their email inbox. When you’re done configuring the new user, just click “apply”. If you find the need to change some of these settings later on you can always get back to the users detail screen by clicking the cogwheel next to their name. This is a common way for administrators to reset a user’s password. By default, the new user will not be able to see any documents in the system because they have not been given permissions to any document types. To give the user permissions to see one or more document types, click on the padlock icon next to the username. Here, we can give the user whatever permissions they need for each document type in the system. We can get a complete list of all document types in the system regardless of catalog by changing the catalog drop down to “all catalogs”.
Typically, at the very least, users need to search and view permissions to perform basic tasks in the system. The search permission gives the user the ability to perform a search and see the list of matching documents but not the documents themselves. The user requires the view permission to be able to view the document itself. The view permission allows users to view documents in that document type from anywhere in the system, like search, catalog browser, or even the coding queue. Users who do not have the view permission will not see any documents in that document type. Users who need the ability to add new documents to the system through capturing or from committing a document in the coding queue, those users will need the add permission. Users to need to modify the properties or fields of the document will need the field edit permission. Users who need to modify the actual document itself, such as making changes to the contents of a Word document or adding comments or digital signatures to a PDF, those users will need the edit permission. You can think of the edit permission as the image edit permission because it gives users permission to edit the actual image instead of the fields. Most of the time, users need both types of edit permissions. For the users who need to delete documents in the system, be sure to give them the delete permission as well. The remaining permissions are used far less often and you can learn more about them by accessing help.
Another way to quickly configure permissions for a user is to add them to the group that already has the right permissions configured. To add a user to a group, just click on the group membership icon next to their username. Choose add group and select one or more groups that should have the user as a member. You can configure group permissions by clicking on the groups area from the admin menu. Just like in the user’s area, you click the padlock icon to configure permissions. The permissions here are exactly the same as the ones in the user’s area, and any permissions that a user gains from being part of a group will override their individual user permissions. For instance, let’s look at the user permissions for the user named admin. We can see that this user does not have any permissions configured at the user level, yet the admin account can see all the documents in the system. This is because the admin user has been added to the administrators group, and that group has permission to all document types in the system.
There’s one more thing to note about the administrators group, it is a special system group. A user has been added to this group has the same level of access to the system as an Ademero engineer, so in other words any user that is added to this group becomes a Content Central administrator, and has all the same abilities as the admin account or any other Content Central administrator. If your system has been configured with active directory integration, then you will see the add AD user button on your user screen which stands for add an active directory user. Clicking on this button will show you a list of users from active directory that you can add to Content Central as a new user by checking the box next to their username and clicking apply. Once you’ve added that user though, be sure to remember to configure permissions for him or her, because adding an AD user is just like adding a regular user, they will not have permissions to any document types in the system by default.
Outside of users and groups, a Content Central administrator will spend most of her time in the catalogs and document types area. This is because most of how the system behaves with documents including how it files them away, where it routes them, what fields must be filled in, and any notifications about things happening with those documents, these items are all associated with a specific document type and so the settings that control them are usually located in this area. For instance, I can add a new field to the purchase order document type here. I can tell Content Central to show that field as a column in all of our results grids. I can even configure workflow to automatically send purchase orders to a specific user’s work queue as soon as they are captured. All of these features are related to the purchase order document type and so they are all configured in this area. When configuring these kinds of settings, you should get into the habit of double-checking that the catalog and the document type that you want to modify are selected in the drop-down boxes in the top of the screen before moving on.
The Content Central event viewer, located on the admin menu, is a great way to find out more about what’s happening in the system, and it’s also a great tool for troubleshooting. You can see who has logged in, all of the documents in the system that have been captured, or even the documents that have been deleted. When working with Ademero support, it can be a great help to provide relevant information from this list of events. Another important piece of information to provide to a Ademero support engineers, is the full version of your Content Central. You can find this in the upper right-hand corner of most of the screens in the admin area, but you can also find it on the login screen. One of the best things you can do to make sure you get quick resolutions from the Ademero support team is to provide remote access to your Content Central server before you have a problem. Most customers provide unattended remote access through RDP, VPN, TeamViewer, or even LogMeIn, but some of our customers prefer for Ademero to install our LogMeIn account onto their server so that they can avoid the hassle of configuring remote access. However you provide access to Ademero, doing so ahead of time allows our chat technicians to quickly check the health of your system and identify potential issues early on instead of waiting for a support representative to be available and to coordinate an attended remote assistance session with someone in your organization who has access to the Content Central server. It also allows us to perform troubleshooting or maintenance tasks during non-business hours when necessary. Customers who have provided unattended remote access ahead of time tend to have resolution times 8 to 10 times faster than customers who haven’t.
In the event of a disaster, it’s important for you to have regular, full backups of the Content Central database and the document storage location. Some of our customers do this manually using SQL Server Management Studio go to backup the database, and using Windows to back up the document storage location. Other customers have set up more automated solutions using freeware or shareware software like SQL Backup and FTP to backup the database and other programs to regularly back up the document storage location. Some customers just backup the Content Central server itself, which is a great solution as long as the database and document storage location are actually located on that server. Be sure to download the Content Central backup requirements document from the support section of the Ademero website. For more information on how to backup your system including step by step instructions on how to perform a manual backup.
In this training we covered the basics of how to administer Content Central, including adding users & groups and configuring security, an overview of how catalogs and document types work, some basic troubleshooting and disaster recovery.
