I've met a lot of people that have been confused about Administrative privileges in MicroStrategy and how they relate to their licensing costs. The confusion possibly is related to an old bundle MicroStrategy used to sell called "Administrator" which included the products Object Manager, Enterprise Manager and Command Manager. While those tools are critical to administer a system, they aren't related to actual Administrative privileges like killing jobs, creating schedules, clearing caches or reloading projects. The truth is that administrative privileges don't require any license beyond a Desktop license and in fact are very granular. You can grant any user access to manage anything in MicroStrategy from full on administrative functions to simple things like clearing the cache.
They have to be sure to install the Administrative Components under the Desktop section of their initial installation, and you have to grant access to most of the individual System Monitors by right clicking them and setting up their security properties. They also need the individual permissions found in the Administration section of Security Roles, but none of those things are actually tied to any special licenses.
This can be a great way to divide up responsibilities among a group or empower some users with the ability to troubleshoot their own issues. For example, I give all of my developers access to the Job Monitor to both view and kill jobs, as well as clear Object and Report caches. These are common tasks that a Developer will need to do, and I've explained the repercussions. This also empowers an additional person to trouble shoot user issues like "I forgot to answer the Date prompt" or "I'm still not seeing that change we just made available in the prompt".
by Bryan Brandow
(This article was first posted on Bryan`s MicroStrategy Blog)
