Administrator Privileges

BY BRYAN SEPTEMBER 5, 2011

Ive met a lot of people that have been confused about

Administrative privileges in MicroStrategy and how they relate to
their licensing costs. The confusion possibly is related to an old
bundle MicroStrategy used to sell called Administrator which
included the products Object Manager, Enterprise Manager and
Command Manager. While those tools are critical to administer a
system, they arent related to actual Administrative privileges like
killing jobs, creating schedules, clearing caches or reloading
projects. The truth is that administrative privileges dont require
any license beyond a Desktop license and in fact are very granular.
You can grant any user access to manage anything in MicroStrategy
from full on administrative functions to simple things like clearing
the cache.

They have to be sure to install the Administrative Components

under the Desktop section of their initial installation, and you have
to grant access to most of the individual System Monitors by right
clicking them and setting up their security properties. They also
need the individual permissions found in the Administration section
of Security Roles, but none of those things are actually tied to any
special licenses.
This can be a great way to divide up responsibilities among a group
or empower some users with the ability to troubleshoot their own
issues. For example, I give all of my developers access to the Job
Monitor to both view and kill jobs, as well as clear Object and Report
caches. These are common tasks that a Developer will need to do,
and Ive explained the repercussions. This also empowers an
additional person to trouble shoot user issues like I forgot to answer

the Date prompt or Im still not seeing that change we just made
available in the prompt.
Tags: Admin

1. The only requirement is to ave server administrator installed, which requires an

intelligence serve license.
Reply

2.

Scott Redding
January 4, 2012 at 7:55 pm

My MicroStrategy instance in Dev is named user.. and it only allows 2 named

users to have an Architect license. So when you give more than two ids access to
the System Administrators group then they get access to some security roles
that fall under the Architect license like Bypass schema objects security
access checks and Import function. So in fact full administrator privileges are
attached to a license. Some privs that you mention in this post are not but I think
when someone sees Administrator Privileges they assume you mean assigning
ids to the System Administrators group and in that case you will get a out of
compliance warning if you exceed your amount of Architect licenses.
Reply

3.

Bryan
January 4, 2012 at 8:01 pm

Good point, Scott. The Bypass schema object option is really just a convenience
shortcut, though it could easily be simulated by simply giving a different group
Modify access at the Public Objects and Schema Objects level and apply it
recursively.
Import Function controls the usage of the Function Plugin Editor. Ive never met
anyone who has ever used that feature
Even so, that still leaves lots of administrative features that can be shared across
other developers/power users without additional licensing!
Reply

4.

Scott Redding
January 5, 2012 at 11:42 pm

Thx for the idea about simulating by recursive access to Public and Schema
objects.. Cant believe I didnt think of that. I need to do that.. as we have
multiple people using administrator id and I want to take back control for many
reasons, most of all just being able to know who did what instead of everything
being updated by administrator.
Reply

5.

Dharani Golla
December 20, 2013 at 2:19 am

Hi Byan,
Have some doubt on distribution services license,am using MSTR 9.3.1,

We are sending mails to email groups using mstr distribution service. Not sure if
this is allowed with the license in free edition. If its allowed then no one will buy
Distribution/IS License for mail delivery.
Pls can u suggest me is i need to buy Distribution services license.
Thanks,
Dharani