Enabling "Import" and "Unlock any record" permissions for non-admin users

Until now, we had restricted the ability to import data (as CSV files) and the ability to being able to unlock any of the locked records, to admin users alone. Due to the nature of these operations, we believed that  such a restriction would be necessary.

Some customers wanted to enable these permissions to trusted users, but at the same time did not want to provide full admin permissions, considering those users to be in an intermediate permission level. Based on their requests, we have now made it possible to enable non-admin users to import data and to be able to unlock any records using Auth Profiles.

While Import permission will be configurable for all entities in the Auth Profile form, the Unlock any record permission will be available for configuration only for entities which have record locking enabled.

Hope you find the new features useful. Feel free to let us know your feedback on how we can make things better for you in your online database application creator. 

Enabling fine-grained Public Access to your Online Database

A lot of our users have been requesting an option to enable publishing of selected subset of data from their online database application, which they have hosted on their Google App Engine account and mapped to their Google Apps domain.

This may be for use-cases like sharing the knowledge-base section from the online database application or may be, to allow users to view a directory of some sort, without having to ask them to login into the application, using their Google / Yahoo! / Google Apps user account.

We have now enabled this public-access facility as a premium feature in iFreeTools, available for paid single-tenant deployments. Preview of the feature is also made available in the free multi-tenant deployment at http://creator.ifreetools.com, which will work like in the paid deployment, except that it will list limited data, so that you can try out the feature before you sign-up for the paid deployment.

To enable public access to your database, you will have to :

1. Define a new Auth Profile with permissions set for the View operation and select the fields which you would like to make visible for public access. Other permissions set for Add / Edit / Delete / etc.,. will be ignored, when this auth-profile is used in the context of public-access.
2. Add a new user with email-id as public-read-only-user@ifreetools.com, associating the auth-profile

That is it!

You can now access the application by tweaking your URL to use a /x/ instead of /b/. That is, if the direct link to your application instance is..
http://creator.ifreetools.com/b/12341234

then, the public access for this web-application will be available at..
http://creator.ifreetools.com/x/12341234

All "write" operations (Add / Edit / Delete) are disabled for the public-access. Your users can still use the embed-able public web-forms, to enable adding new records into the database.

All the public access pages will be marked with a noindex and nofollow meta-tag, so the contents would not be indexed by crawlers which follow this meta directive. This meta-tag can be removed on request, in paid single-tenant deployments.

Hope you like this new feature. Feel free to use the feedback form in the application and let us know how we can help you meet more of your business use-cases with iFreeTools.

CRM for Google AppEngine adds Authorization, Audit and Pre-defined Views

iFreeTools CRM (alpha) - the CRM for Google AppEngine, just got an upgrade. With this upgrade, iFreeTools CRM has added support for..

• Authorization
  
• Audit
  
• Pre-defined Views

Authorization and Audit :

Authorization will be based on the user roles, currently limited to "admin", "user" and "guest".

Audit records will be automatically added for all completed write operations and for attempts to perform unauthorized operations. Audit records cannot be added, edited or deleted directly by users and any attempts to do so will also be audited.

Apart from Audit data, authorization for views and actions are as listed below..

• admin - maximum privileges
  
  • viewing, adding, copying, editing and deleting of records in all modules (except for changing own login to non-admin role or deleting one's own login)
  
  
• user - normal privileges
  
  • viewing of records in all modules
    
  • adding of records in all modules, except Users
    
  • copying, editing and deleting of records for which the user is the owner
  
  
• guest - limited privileges
  
  • viewing of records in all modules.
  
  

Pre-defined Views

First cut support for views is now in. All modules by default will have minimum of two views, one to view all records (example : All Leads, All Accounts, etc.,.) and one to view records related to them (My Leads, My Accounts, etc.,.).

Apart from these 2 views, pre-defined views specific to the module have also been provided. For Leads the additional views are..

• Converted Leads
  
• Open Leads
  
• Lost Leads
  
• Junk Leads
  
• My Open Leads

The left-side tab-based navigation has been modified to include such views..


Go ahead and check out the features and send in your feedback.

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BTW, the ads just got smaller on our free CRM application..
* Horizontal (on header) : From 728x90 ("Leaderboard") to 468x60 ("Banner")
* Vertical (on left sidebar) : From 160x600 ("Wide Skyscraper") to 125x125 ("Button")

So, you will see lesser distractions from competitors of iFreeTools.

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