PIPER-Rx - Review application accounts

Reviewing Your Active Application Accounts

Reviewing your active application accounts is a simple process that has so many benefits. There are so many reasons inconsistencies creep into your user accounts...

Accounts are created in a rush
"I will add the description and e-mail address later"
“Company standards are so important that most people have their own”
Users can chnage their own descrptions via self service profiles

The unfortunate thing is that a review of active application accounts is very rarely carried out.

When you create a new user using the oracle screen (User > Define) you cannot see any other users accounts, as such a standard is not obvious.

Some inconsistencies can be quite visible, e.g. the user’s description is show at the top of the self service welcome screen...

Instead of:

Welcome – John Doe

It is not a good for your users to see

Welcome - Annoying user

Back in the early days of Oracle E-Business Suite (The then Oracle Financials) when the user description was not used, we used to add all sorts of descriptions to describe the user as a warning for other Applications Administrators. With the advent of Self service a clean up was required.

So in some cases you end up with a mess. This is a simple report you can run that has a huge value:

  SELECT report_headings.report_date,
         report_headings.sid_name,
         fu.user_id,
         substr(fu.user_name, 1, 40) user_name,
         substr(fu.description, 1, 40) description, 
         fu.email_address,
         to_char(fu.last_logon_date, 'DD-Mon-YY HH24:MI') last_logon_date,
         trunc((sysdate - fu.last_logon_date)) days_since_last_connect
    FROM applsys.fnd_user fu,
         ( SELECT to_char(sysdate, 'DD-Mon-YY HH24:MI') report_date,
                   vd.name sid_name
             FROM v$database vd ) report_headings     
   WHERE (fu.end_date IS NULL
           OR fu.end_date > SYSDATE )
   ORDER by fu.user_name

I have provided a report (Active Accounts) that lists all the currently active accounts. The report can be found in the free reports page .

What you are looking for is:

Account names that do not conform to your naming standard
Missing Descriptions or a descriptions that do not conform to your standard
Missing or incorrect e-mail addresses
Spelling mistakes

Where a account does not have an e-mail address you may want to set that address to the workflow administrator, that way if the user account is ever used in a workflow the notification does not go off into the never never....

Remember you can change a user account name (See tips page)

If you don’t have a standard then create one – management love standards

Want to know more? User Account Management is something many of sites could do a lot better so I have now devoted PAMtutorials to the subject so why not check this out as well!

Last update: May 2009

PIPER-Rx Oracle E-Business Suite Resource Centre

Reviewing Your Active Application Accounts

PIPER-Rx
Oracle E-Business Suite Resource Centre