Export controls

Near the end of last year, we introduced export notifications for sensitive commercial or personal data. Along with various other features, that lets administrators of a system be notified by email if a user exports more than a certain amount of data.

Well, this week’s update expands on that. As well as being notified, administrators can, per table, control how much a user can export at any one time, i.e. they can set a hard limit. This limit takes effect per export, so bear in mind it wouldn’t stop someone exporting an entire database of contacts for example, by doing lots of different filters and exports one at a time (e.g. all As, all Bs, all Cs etc.) but it would increase the effort and the administrator would get lots of notifications.

Remember, you can also set privileges to prevent any exporting at all for certain groups of people and/or views.

Setup

To set this up, go to the Build section in the agileBase admin interface. Then go to the manage tab for the table you’d like to control.

Make sure that one or both of ‘stores sensitive’ or ‘stores personal’ data are ticked and you’ll see two options. The first lets you set the limit at which admins will be notified of exports (e.g. 10 records). The second, which is the new option, lets you set the ‘hard’ limit. If someone tries to export more than this, the rows exported will automatically be cut off after this number.

The export limit applies to all views based on the table, in fact all views which any data from the table appears in. If a view uses data from many different tables, the minimum export limit will be applied when exporting from that view.

Please take a moment to think whether this will be useful for your organisation and set it up if so – we want all customer data to be as well protected as possible.

If you’ve any queries, don’t hesitate to get in touch as usual.