BACKGROUND

In the Pipeline Pilot Server Administration Portal under Setup > Global Properties, there is an Insight for Excel property named "ProtocolsPath" which defines the path used by Insight for Excel to find protocols to be made available in the client UI.

QUESTION

A customer wanted to allow users to publish their own protocols for use with Insight for Excel. In order to do this, they added the individual user folders to the ProtocolsPath global property. But when a user connects to the server, depending on the order in which the user's folder is defined in the ProtocolsPath, the result is one or more of:

• Users are not able to see their own protocols
• There is an error message like: "Cannot access component named ..."
• The Excel status bar keeps showing "Retrieving protocols list..."

ANSWER

Since only the individual user has access to their own user folder, BIOVIA do not recommend the addition of individual user folders to the ProtocolsPath global property.

Where individual folders are needed for each user, BIOVIA recommends creating these as sub-folders of a publicly accessible folder and using the Security > Access Rights panel in the Pipeline Pilot Server Administration Portal to restrict access to these individual folders. This also has the advantage that an individual can provide read-only access to their user folder to other named users and/or groups.