Proxies

Proxies in Newton are per responsibility, or function. This enables the same person, in their absence, to be proxied by different users for different responsibilities. This is currently tailored to the responsibilities which users can have in the approval process, which are:

Administrator

Approver

As Newton derives that information through contact groups, but only persons who have a user account in Newton can log in and work in the approval (or any) area of Newton, it is important to understand that the proxies area only offers contacts which are connected to a user account (and which have one of the contact groups relevant in the approval).

Regular Users

Regular users have an entry “My Proxies” in the “Home” section of the left-hand navigation.

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The opening page provides an overview of users' current proxies and allows them to set up or edit their own proxies.

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At the top of the page, a user can see whether they are currently a proxy and for whom.

If no proxies are defined:

Otherwise:

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The table below works like other similar tables in Newton, with add, edit, and delete buttons.

Adding an Entry

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On the “My Proxies” page, users can only add entries for themselves, hence the first select is disabled and re-populated with the user’s (contact’s, to be precise) name.

The middle select will be filled with the responsibilities the selected user can have (Administrator and/or Approver).

After selecting one of the responsibilities in the middle select, the appropriate users/contacts will be loaded in the right-most select. It contains the users who also have the selected responsibility.

A from date is mandatory.

The end date can be left blank, which means a “proxyship” with an open end.

The purpose of the lower checkbox is explained with an info box. Usually, if a user is proxied by another user, any approval notification email goes only to the proxy. The idea behind this is that the original user is unavailable, hence the necessity to be proxied, and they should not be bothered with notifications during their absence. Checking the box causes the notifications to be sent to the original user as well. It is not an exclusive either/or, the notifications are always sent to the proxy.

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When adding/editing an entry, it can be temporarily disabled. This allows deactivating the proxy rule without having to delete it completely, so it can be activated easily at a later point.

Deactivated rules have a visual signal in the right-most column of the table.

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Be aware that the initial view of the page focuses on active proxies. Thus, if you edit an active entry and suspend it temporarily, then upon updating the contents of the table, that entry will disappear. If you uncheck the box “Active proxies only” (as shown above), they should appear.

In case inactive proxies are chosen to be displayed as well, you will also see entries with an end date in the past. The text of such inactive entries (past or suspended) appears in gray, the active ones in green.

Not to be confused with the user status colors in front of the user/contact names. They could give a hint that someone is actively proxied by an inactive user, which does not have access to Newton any more and therefore wouldn’t be able to do approvals.

Many of the concepts explained here apply to the admin proxy page, but there are some restrictions.

Admin Users

Users with the right 'Proxies/Manage', or System Administrators, will see an entry “Proxies” in the left-hand navigation under the “Admin” section.

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This Proxies overview page also contains the blue info box about current proxyships, just because it does not do any harm. The information there is still tied to the current user, so it is the same as if that user opened their “My Proxies” page.

The table below contains all (active) proxies:

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