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Fredrik_Lautrup
Employee
Employee

For any BI tool to work it needs to understand who is using the tool. If we know who is using the tool (authentication) we also need to understand things about them such as where they work, e-mail address etc. If we know who the user is and what describes him/here we can do things like giving them access to the right information and tailor their experience. We therefore have methods in both QlikView and Qlik Sense to access information describing the users in user directories. Even though we have this capability in both QlikView and Qlik Sense, their approach to doing it is very different.

The most common user directory used by our customers is LDAP. LDAP is a distributed database that is suitable for maintaining user information.  It exists in both open solutions developed by the open source community (such as OpenLDAP) and in closed solutions (such as Microsoft Active Directory).

So what are the differences between QlikView and Qlik Sense?

QlikView is based on the concept with a directory service connector that fetch user information as it is needed. It doesn't replicate any data stored in the LDAP database, but instead asks a question every time it needs access to user information including groups.

Qlik Sense uses a sync approach, which means that it replicates the user information including groups from LDAP into a database and then keeps this in sync. This can be done in different ways (sync all users, sync with a filter, sync only users that access Qlik Sense) depending on your needs and size of directory.

There are two major usages of the user information, each with different needs: for management and for access control/authorization.

For management it is good if the information is current but not absolutely critical, so here the Qlik Sense scheduler is used to update the data.

For security however, it is critical that information is current. Therefore individual user records are updated as the user connects to the Qlik Sense environment.

So, are there any similarities in how you configure Qlik Sense and QlikView?

Yes

In the picture below I describe the relations between QlikView LDAP configuration and Qlik Sense LDAP Configuration.

QlikView to Qlik Sense Mapping.png

I hope that you found these tips on how we access user information helpful. If you have questions on this blog post or have ideas of what you want to read about in the future, please don’t hesitate to add comments to post.