Answered
Disable "Recent Activity" (audit log)
Have the ability to disable the "Recent History" section (coming from the audit log) displayed on the home page of the AODocs Library.
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This feature has also been requested by our users as well. There are times when you don't want content or other user activity displayed to all library members.
The recent activity is just too much 'noise'. Better to allow the option to turn on or off.
A quick follow-up comment. One of the reasons some of our users wanted to disable Recent activities on the home page is that they were worried about people seeing titles of content that might display information that the should not be seeing (e.g. a file called "super secret stuff for vendor A was updated" might be seen by someone that didn't have access to the folder where it was stored in the library and shouldn't be seeing the title). After some testing we discovered that no library member will see "Recent activities" if they do not have access to the files or folders that were changed. In other words, the "Recent activities" section enforces the permissions of the library and only displays to users what they are entitled to edit/view. This is a feature that AODocs should document in their KB since it is a GREAT feature to have and would have saved us some grief on dealing with complaints.
From that perspective, the only reason we would want to disable Recent activity is to eliminate "clutter" on the landing page.
Hello Rosemary,
Thank you for your valuable comment! I will make sure that our Knowledge Base is updated with this precision on the recent activity content activity.
On a longer term, we are planning to refactor the library home page with a fully customizable interface made of widgets. The library administrator could choose and drag&drop these widgets. It is still very early stage of development, but it is our direction.
Hi Thibault, Rosemary,
Actually, the activity log does not enforce the permissions of the library. It may for checked out documents (though it seems to show the transition from the standard to the draft state at least), but if you have a workflow with standard states only, and permissions being adjusted along the workflow, then the permissions of the library are not applied in the activity log.
Thibault if you want to check, you can check the library Deira Island STP, the document class "document". Only one document is there, with initially visibility to the contractor only, and later to the client. While the client does not see the document at the beginning of the workflow, he can see all the activity during that period, including all the comments of the workflow transitions on which he has no permissions!! This is extremely dangerous. Comments in workflow transitions and activity log HAVE to be strictly in line with document permissions and they are not as of today.
Can't believe I didn't realize this before. This is an enormous problem for us, and may cause us to turn the system off for a particular user group. Even though this user group can't see the documents in question, just seeing the title in some cases is an enormous exposure.
Hello Nicolas, Amy,
We doubled-checked this afternoon for Amy's configuration and the event visibility in the "Recent Activity" section of the library homepage is bound to the permissions of the document. It is a matter of document class security configuration.
In the case of Nicolas, it is not directly related to the "Recent Activity" section of the library homepage. When you give view access to a user to the document, the document history is available as well. Workflow comments, transitions, documents updates, etc. are part of the document history and are not bound to the permissions timeline.
I see Nicolas' comment as another feature request:
"Make the document history time sensitive based on the timestamp of the permissions: all events prior to the sharing are hidden".
I withdraw my previous comment and Thibault is correct: I was able to solve this by tweaking the permissions in the class. (I don't use workflow in this library, so not sure how that would or would not impact how permissions affect what the user sees in Recent Activity.)
However, I still would vote for removing the Recent History from being a mandatory portion of the home page for other reasons, including:
Thibault,
I have already commented this to the support extensively (ticket 9742), this is not at all the expected behavior. When a user comments on an approval step, he is commenting to the next level up, that is all. He might not even be aware of where the document is going in the workflow. Same thing when he is commenting back to someone if he rejects a step, this is directed to the person one level down, not everybody.
This means that today a simple workflow of internal approval + external approval, used anywhere in the construction industry by all DMS cannot be realized in AODocs, simply because I do not want my client to see internal comments and history. And workarounds today are far from simple. This is a real issue for me, well beyond a feature request. I had understood the draft would allow me to do this, but it does not since all the history is then shared with my client once I check in.
Many people have been asking for the "recent activity" and by extension "history" and "comments" visibility to be set by permissions for almost a year now, which would provide a solution / workaround for the various situations described above. Can AODocs please respond to the users and incorporate this feature at the earliest?
Thanks!
Please advise if we can setup the permission for recent activity by individual workflow?
Dien Do Nguyen Can you detail what you are trying to achieve? As I understand it you would like to see the recent activity for a specific workflow across all its documents?
Let me give you an example. We are having two workflows (1) Salary workflow and (2) Master data creation. Due to the security risk for salary workflow, we turned off the recent activities because we don't want some of the administrators to view the salary approval status (except HR). However, when doing it, the other users are not able to see the approval status in the (2) master data creation (in the side panel). What we would like to see:
(1) No one (except the specific roles) can see the recent activity for Salary workflow
(2) Everyone could see the approval status in the side panel of the (2) Master data creation
Thanks !
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