Admin Pages in IDE vs App

[CathyC]

For any application, there are setup steps (like turning entire features on and setting the landing pages for customer types) and there are maintenance steps (like creating a user and assigning a roles or authorization type to that user).

The assumption is that in 5.1 all the applications will use the IDE pages for both, meaning they use it to maintain users, roles, etc. The pages to do this are prebuilt and wont have to be rebuilt in the apps that we create in EASYProcess.

But this breaks down as we have more use within EASYProcess. To be really successful, it should be integrated into the business so the IT people that set it up don't end up as the only ones who use it.

For EASYCommerce, the end user admins are customer service, who were not involved with the creation of the application and should not be given access to the IDE. During EASYCommerce projects, it is decided who will maintain the application and the answer usually is not the IT group who was involved in its setup.
Also, if EASYCommerce users are set up in the IDE, they are usually made incorrectly and cause the application to fail (not set up with proper application properties)
For these reasons, EASYCommerce has hundreds of sources because it has a robust customer and admin portion of the application.

EASYCommerce is still easy for customers to take and make it their own because those admin pages are part of the base product that is downloaded to their tenant and is part of the application. The full project time is used to set up the customer side (higher ROI) and doesnt need to be spent making admin pages to support the application over its life (not a flashy feature, but necessary).

But for other applications that are simpler, they don't have an application side admin page for actions the admin has to maintain. This limits those applications to being maintained in the IDE. Then since the IDE is so powerful, access to it should not be given to non-technical users.

The customers could build the admin portals themselves or have us build them, but even if the costs were 0, it takes time to build them which contributes to the thought that "everything in EASYProcess has to be built from scratch" which takes away from the wow factor of being able to do anything with it (because you spend time doing the boring responsible steps instead of ROI building flashy features).

The result is capped growth to the application where it can only be maintained by IT technical users, typically the ones who set up the application.

SUGGESTION 1 A: New tenants should have prebuilt pages that come with the app to edit users and assign roles and authorizations - any of the tasks in the IDE that could be considered part of constant maintenance.
SUGGESTION 1 B: The prebuilt pages and the IDE pages should both use services used to access/update the users and assign roles. It could be accessible with just a query, but to reuse code and minimize breaking if it changes in the future, all the places should use the same logic. That should be with services that access these tables. Customer developers don't know the tables anyway and we shouldnt expect them to learn what they are. This way even if they do change these prebuilt pages, it is still intuitive to use.
SUGGESTION 2: Our pre-built apps should have admin pages to maintain them built in

[JustinVanRegenmorter]

Task 11243 has been created for this feature request.