PAW: Customized login error messages for non authorized users

Problem:

When setting up PAW to allow for user imports (ENABLE_USER_IMPORT = false configuration setting) the message a user that tries to log on to Planning Analytics license without being set up as a PAW user is not user friendly and looks very much like a technical server error.

The user we have tried with has access to the underlying TM1 instances but is not set up as a user in PAW. The user can log on to Arcitecht, pmpsvc and tm1-web without any issues.

When this user tries to log on to PAW an error is shown, see attached screen dumps. We understand that this is the intended behavior – the user should not be allowed to use PAW as he is not pre-defined as a user in PAW – but the message shown is not user friendly and do not give any hint on how the user could resolve the access issue.

Workaround:

There is no workaround at this point (confirmed by IBM Support), users will have to report an error, not always understanding that they should apply for access.
NOTE: The correct workaround is NOT to set all PA users to automatically receive PAW access.

Proposed solutions:

Make it possible to set default, customizable error pages/messages for PAW (webserver part).

Benefits:

- More user friendly messages means users may be more positive to the tool, as they understand why the are getting a specific error message.

- Faster internal support due to that the error is recognisable.

User impact:

Depending on the organisational setup and whether new users have the information to request access, all new users will receive the error message.

Hopefully the users would only see the error message once.