Applies to:  eMIMS Classic

• Windows 2000 and XP Professional limit what a “normal user” can do.

 

Background

The evolution of Windows has seen a shift from the computer-centric experience in Windows 95, to the individualised user-based experience that we see in Windows XP. In support of this change, Windows has increasingly limited the changes that a single user can make that may affect other users of the computer.

Programming “Best Practices” have changed dramatically to reflect this.

eMIMS is not fully Windows 2000/XP compatible.

• It has files that it writes to in the EMIMS directory structure usually found under ..\Program Files\.
• It stores information in the computer-wide section of the registry (eg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE).

This will not be changed in the foreseeable future.

 

Permissions for Installing eMIMS

Obviously, the installing user needs significant permissions. The following discussion is based on the assumption that the program is successfully installed and running for an Admin. A member of the User group cannot install eMIMS or run the Update Wizard, as they do not have sufficient permissions to make the required changes in the registry etc.

 

Permissions for running eMIMS: Standalone Installation

A member of the User group (or even Guests) can use eMIMS, provided an administrator has added Write permissions for the User group to the ..\Program Files\EMIMS\ subdirectory.

 

Without this, the program fails with an error saying the Notes.mdb is in use. What it really means is that Jet has tried to create the NOTES.ldb file and failed, so it can’t open the database as read/write as requested by the program. (Current versions of the program look for this problem and disable the Notes functionality if read/write access is denied).

 

No changes to preferences can be saved back to the registry without modifying the User group permissions to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\EMIMS.

 

The usability of the program isn’t really affected if you choose not to alter the registry permissions – the users will just always see the program start up with the default settings (unless these are altered by an admin). This may be a problem if a user is bugged by the “Tip of the Day”, or more importantly if the “Enable PDF Printing” for CMIs needs to be adjusted.

 

Permissions for running eMIMS: Network Installation

With a network install, the user’s permissions on the local machine do not really affect the running of eMIMS.

The user must have read/write/create permissions in the EMIMS subdirectory (and its subfolders) on the file server where the server image is located. On our server, our eMIMS server image is located in a general purpose low security area, so the permissions that are inherited on creation of the subdirectory are fine (shown below).

 

User settings are still saved in the local registry, so you would need to adjust permissions on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\EMIMS on each machine to allow user settings to be saved.