Access user-level security strategy

Brief introduction

If you are a Microsoft Office veteran, you may be familiar with the encryption features of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. All of these programs allow file owners to encrypt files quickly and easily by using simple passwords. However, Access does not provide similar functionality, but there are other aspects of relatively tight feature settings that guarantee the security of the database. This article will introduce you to the user-level security features of access, which allows you to set the access permissions that are given to individual database users.

User-level security is powerful enough to allow you to control the types of data that different users can access (for example, to prevent salespeople from viewing accounting data) and what they can do with the database (for example, only human resources departments are allowed to modify personnel records).

Before you start, it's important to keep in mind that access features are a replica of some of the features of a more powerful database, such as SQL Server and Oracle. Access is fundamentally a single user database. If you want to use user-level security to deploy complex security patterns to your database, it's best to discard Access databases and buy more powerful relational databases.

Let's take a look at how to deploy user-level security mode on an Access database.

The first step is to start the wizard, select the Security submenu from the Tools menu, and then click the User-Level Security Wizard command. As shown in figure one.

Figure I

Create a new workgroup information file

The first dialog box of the wizard asks you whether you want to create a new workgroup information file or edit an existing workgroup information file. This article assumes that you are creating a new security file, so select "Create a new workgroup information file" and click "Next" as shown in Figure two.

Figure II