The nice thing with ZENworks Reporter is that you can give people access to reports or dashboards while they have no rights within ZENworks. It’s useful to have reports available for management or maybe for your finance department. If you configure the user source and set the rights within ZENworks Reporter, the users can login and get access to the reports they need.

What I have seen is that some customers would like to make some of the reports publicly available without the need to login. In this article I’ll describe how this can be done.

To make the reports available publicly, you will need to use a dummy-user account and a group so that you can give rights to the reports needed. For this, the usersource needs to be configured within ZENworks Reporting.

Rights within ZENworks Reporting are based on groups in the Directory, so the first thing that needs to be done is to create a group that you can use to assign the rights. Next create a user account and make it a member of the group so that you can use this to assign rights within Jaspersoft. (If you have restricted access to ZENworks Reporting, also add the user to the group that defines who is allowed to login).

As an example, in my demo environment I have a user zrs-readonly and its a member of the group zrs-public, and its part of my zrs-login group I have configured restricted access.

Now you will need to login to ZENworks Reporting with the user you created so that Jaspersoft will import the group and create the Role for this. You will see that the user doesn’t have rights, so you can logout and login with an Administrator account to do the remaining configuration.

For the reports you would like to make publicly available, we’ll need to create a separate folder. Create a folder where you can store the reports, go to View -> Repository. Right click on the reports folder and create a folder.



Now right click the folder that you just created and select Permissions, look for the role that belongs to the group that you created and give it execute only rights.



To get access to the report, you also need rights to the domain and datasource. Go to the permissions of the Domains folder and give the Role execute only rights. Do the same for the Data Sources folder.

Now that you have the folders and rights in place, you can copy the reports you want to make public to the folder that you created, or create some new reports.

Open the report and copy the URL. You will need to use this but you need to add some information to add the login credentials of the dummy user.

At the end of the URL add the following:

&decorate=no&j_username=<your username>&j_password=<your password>

The additional information obviously has the username and password, the &decorate=no is used to remove the banner on top of the screen. You can now use the URL you created on your intranet page to create some hyperlinks where people will be able to access the report without the need to login to ZENworks Reporter.

The trick that you have used to open the reports will work with dashboards as well, but for dashboards you can’t put the additional string at the end of the URL. You will need to put it in front of the # character in the URL. With this, you can also use the auto-login to access dashboards. Be aware that the dashboard will need execute rights on all reports that are used on the dashboard.