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September 2005 Volume 9, Number 2
Security and Systems Management Spotlight
SoftMenu — Providing Information to Your Auditors
By Sandy King, Product Manager
As the primary interface between your end users and the applications they run, SoftMenu is essentially the key to the vault. Without command line access, your end users can execute only those programs that correspond with their assigned SoftMenu options. Which users have access to your company's critical applications is something auditors often ask. An auditor doesn't care whether the user can access these applications from a main menu or from a 7th level submenu; he or she simply wants to know who can get to these sensitive programs.
SoftMenu includes a number of reports that you can use to document option assignment, option usage, option attributes, and so on.
Creative Querying
The Print SoftMenu Users report answers the above question about who has access to certain applications. Like all of our reports, you can run it either from the Reporting Menu, or by executing a command. This ability is particularly useful if you need to run the same report on a regular basis (nightly, weekly, etc). You can either print the report output, or send it to an output file. One SoftMenu customer found the output file method handy when their auditor requested a blend of information about users who had access to specific options. Specifically, the auditor wanted the report to include the user name as well as other data about the user that was contained in company specific files. Sending the Print SoftMenu Users Report output to a file allowed this customer to build a query that pulled the desired information from both sources.
Because the information requested during an audit is completely subjective, it's not likely that we have a report to satisfy the whim of every auditor. Nonetheless, our database generally contains everything an auditor wants to know, and satisfying your auditor's information requirements is often just a matter of querying the correct files. If our current set of reports does not provide the information you need, please call Tech Support and we'll help you determine which files to query.
For example, suppose your auditor wants to know every user that has access to a particular option, as well as how they access it — whether from their main menu or from a specific submenu. In this case, the best file to query is MOPTASGF. The data shown on the Work with Option Assignments panel (place a 5 next to a user or option on the Work with SoftMenu Users or Work with Option Masterfile panels respectively to view this panel) is derived from MOPTASGF. Keep in mind that this file is not dynamically updated and needs to be rebuilt if it's not up to date. When you are on the Work with Option Assignments panel, you'll know the data needs to be refreshed if you see F19=Update changes at the bottom of your screen. Alternatively, you can refresh the data by running the UPDOPTASG command. An easy way to keep this view current is to run the UPDOPTASG command on a nightly basis.
Audits: Becoming the Rule, Not the Exception
Whether mandated by law or implemented by internal policies, audits are becoming commonplace. With this in mind, our next release of SoftMenu (Release 6.1) will focus on providing enhanced auditing information. In the new release, you'll be able to track changes to users, options, option assignments, submenus, and default values, by division. In this way, you can audit your Production division, but not your Test division. You'll be able to password protect options, as well as designate "key" (sensitive) options. New and enhanced reports will list which users have key options assigned, who had access to a particular option on a given date, what users/options were deleted over a given date range, and so on. Watch for this new SoftMenu release in late 2005 or early 2006.
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