Introduction

The Administration Manager is a tool that allows administrators to:

Set up preferences for groups; for more information, see The Preferences Tab.
Import and export users and groups, for more information, see The Import Tab and The Export Tab.

All other administrative functions that were previously performed in the Administrator Manager can now be performed in the web interface of Spotfire Server.

Although the Administration Manager currently offers the same administrative functionality as its previous version, Spotfire Server offers a new, streamlined interface and easy access to both new and existing features

The Administration Manager provides tools to handle users and groups, assign licenses, and publish new updates to the Spotfire Server. The tool is divided into five tabs:

Users - change passwords, include a user in a group, view enabled features for a user.
Groups and Licenses - create and manage groups, assign members to groups, assign licenses.
Preferences - set up client preferences for groups.
Import - import previously exported users and groups.
Export - export the current users and groups.

Concerning Groups

Groups are a central aspect of the Spotfire environment. It is important to know the many aspects where groups are used, before designing and creating the group hierarchy on the server.

Groups are first and foremost used to group users into categories. Doing this allows you to specify settings for a group instead of for each individual user. When a setting change is needed, you only need to edit that group, and not each user in it. Settings made for a group are inherited by groups that are members of that group.

Settings are also additive, which means a user that is a member of a group far down in the hierarchy will inherit all the settings from all the parent groups up through the group hierarchy. It is therefore recommended to create groups with a generic purpose high up in the hierarchy, and if needed, create groups with a more specialized purpose further down.

However, not all groups need to be placed in the same hierarchical top-down tree. It can, for example, be very powerful to handle licenses via a hierarchical tree, but parallel to that, create a number of separate top-level groups which correspond to another property of your company, such as projects. These groups could be used to handle Spotfire Library privileges.

Example:

What is Controlled via Groups?

There are several things in the Spotfire system that are controlled by groups:

Licenses - Licenses are set on group level and determine which features are enabled for each user.
Library permissions - Permissions to folders in the library are set on group level.
Preferences - Preferences, such as which font settings should be used as default in different parts of the application, are set on group level.

Roles and Special Groups

In the Spotfire system, there are three special groups that are present at installation time and that are not possible to remove. These groups define different roles. Roles can be viewed as different sets of tasks the members of the groups are supposed to and allowed to perform. To assign a role to a user, simply add him or her to one of the special groups.

Last update: 2025-03-13