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Managing Profiles and Role Centers

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Profiles are collections of Dynamics NAV users who share the same Role Center. A Role Center is a type of page on which you can place different parts. Each part is a container in which you can host other pages or pre-defined system parts, such as an Outlook part or parts for adding tasks, notifications, or notes.

About profiles and Role Centers

You use profiles to link users to pre-defined Role Centers. A Role Center is a home page for all users of a profile, which has been configured to reflect the tasks and priorities of users of the profile. For example, the Order Processor Role Center has been configured to reflect the tasks and priorities of an order processor. A Role Center provides easy access to information users need to perform their daily work. For example, the Role Center determines the Cues, or tile, that show when isers first sign in, and the links from the navigation page.

The profile that is used appears in the header of the Role Center’s main content area. An administrator can customize this Role Center to meet the needs of a specific role in a specific company. The Order Processor Role Center can then be further personalized on a single computer to meet the needs of a person who is carrying out the job as an order processor. This person can personalize the Role Center by saving queries, adding filters, and adding or removing fields.

Profiles and Role Centers align with the roles and responsibilities in your organization. Dynamics NAV provides a set of default profiles, which each correspond to and link to a Role Center. Administrators can modify existing profiles or create new ones.

Note

Profiles are not explicitly linked to the roles and permissions that constitute the security system, but profile users must have permissions that align with their roles in the security system. For more information, see Security Overview in the developer and IT-pro help.

To create a profile

  1. Choose the Search for Page or Report icon, enter Profiles, and then choose the related link.

  2. Choose the New action to open the New Profile Card window.

  3. In the Profile ID field, enter a name that describes the intended role of the user.

  4. In the Description field, enter a description of the Profile ID, for example, Order Processor.

  5. Set the Role Center ID field to the Role Center that you want to assign to the profile.

  6. To make this Role Center the default for the profile, select the Default Role Center check box.

  7. Choose the OK button. .

The procedure for modifying an existing profile is the same, except you select an existing profile in the Profiles page instead of choosing the New action.

Copying a profile

Copying a profile can save you time if you want to use similar settings on a profile and you only want to change a few settings.

  1. Open the profile that you want to copy, and then choose the Copy Profile action.

  2. In New Profile ID field, enter a name for the profile that you want to copy.

  3. Set the New Profile Scope field to one of the following:

    • System to make the new profile available to all tenant databases that use the application.
    • Tenant to make the new profile available to just the current tenant database.

  4. Choose the OK buttom when done.

Exporting and importing profiles

You can export and import profiles as XML files to and from the a Dynamics NAV database. Exporting and importing a profile can save you time when configuring the user interface because you reuse an existing profile configuration instead of having to configure a profile from scratch. If you have a profile that is configured in a Dynamics NAV database and you would like to reuse all or some of the same profile configurations in another database, you can export the profile to an XML file. Then, you can import the profile XML file into the other database.

  • To export a profile, open search for and open the Export Profiles page, select the profile from the list, and then choose the Export action. Save the XML file to a location on your computer or network.

  • To import a profile, open search for and open the Import Profiles page, select the profile XML file, and then choose the OK button.

    Note

    You cannot import a profile that already exists in the database, even though the XML file is named differently or has different content. You must delete the existing profile before you can import the new profile.

See Also

Dynamics 365 Business Central
How to: Manage Users and Permissions
Customizing the User Interface