How To Impersonate Users

Overview

User Impersonation is a feature that allows system administrators and certain staff members to log in as another Veracross user for testing purposes. Impersonation is supported in all Veracross apps except for Composer.

Allowing Impersonation

Users with the SysAdmin_1 security role can use impersonation without further setup. For other users, one of the special User Impersonation security roles need to be granted. Each role has other security roles as prerequisites. If a user does not have one of the prerequisite roles, an error will be displayed when trying to grant an impersonation role. Similarly, if a user has an impersonation role and their prerequisite role is removed, the impersonation role will also be removed.

There are three Impersonation roles:

Impersonate Current Families

This role allows users to impersonate Students, Future Students, Parents, and Parents of Future Students. A user must have a Staff or Division Head role before being given this role.

Impersonate Admissions Families

This role allows users to Applicants, Prospects, and Parents of Applicants/Prospects. A user must have a Staff or Admissions role before being given this role.

Impersonate Faculty

This role allows users to impersonate Faculty. A user must have a Staff or Division Head role before being given this role.

Using Impersonation

Using impersonation is simple. As long as you have permission, you can log in as another user by entering your credentials in the following format:

username: your_username/their_username
password: your_password

That is to say, in a username field, enter your username, followed by a forward slash, followed by the username of the person you wish to impersonate. Use your own password. Assuming you have permission to impersonate that user, you will be logged in as that user. Note that schools using Active Directory integration must log in with each user’s full username (i.e. john.smith@veracross.com rather than john.smith) in order to successfully log in with user impersonation.

Additionally, you an impersonate a user by directly manipulating your URL. Before your school's short name, insert the username of the person you want to impersonate, followed by an "@" symbol.

Impersonating Users with Multiple Roles

This applies primarily when you impersonate a faculty member who is also a parent, but only have permission to impersonate either faculty or parents. In that case, you will not be able to access the portal for the role you do not have access to. For example, if John Smith is a faculty and parent, and you only have permission to impersonate faculty, you will not have access to John’s parent portal.

Audit Log of Impersonation Records

Impersonation-related Security Roles requires the user to have one or more prerequisite roles (Staff_1, Division_Head_3, etc., as detailed above). Removing a prerequisite role automatically removes dependent roles with it, which is logged in by the system.

Additionally, changing who is being impersonated without signing out and back in is recorded in the Login Log (even thought it’s not a “login”), and there are two new result values: Impersonation Allowed and Impersonation Denied.