A system like Merce Broadside must deliver ease and security in administration and control features. Some control features enhance security and prevent accidents; others allow more reliable functioning in a multi-team or shared environment.
Delegated rights management. Merce Broadside allows different levels of users to be delegated different degrees of freedom, thus allowing controlled delegation of rights. Each Merce Broadside installation can operate multiple applications in parallel. Applications can be any of three types: bulk mail, mailing list or auto-responder. Each application can have its own set of administrative users, and each user can be assigned fine-grained rights for administrative tasks. This allows effective department-wise delegation of applications and secure sharing of a single Merce Broadside system as an organisational facility.
Two levels of users. There are two levels of users created in any Merce Broadside installation: Level 1 or global users and Level 2 or per-app users. Level 1 (L1) users can create or delete user accounts, monitor overall system health, start and stop services which will affect all applications, etc. Level 2 (L2) users are associated with specific applications, and can perform all administrative tasks associated with their application(s). This allows a single Merce Broadside system to be used as an organisation-wide resource, where L2 users are from the user departments and L1 users manage the infrastructure.
Fine grained authorization privileges. Merce assigns rights to users in fine-grained increments, instead of the simplistic all-or-nothing model of more primitive systems. The tasks allowed to L1 users have been grouped under distinct privileges. Not all L1 users can perform all L1 tasks --- his rights depend on the authorization privileges given to him. Similarly, the tasks allowed to L2 users depend on their fine-grained authorization privileges. For instance, some users may be allowed to modify the parameters of an application definition, but may not have the rights to start and stop outgoing queues --- a potentially disruptive action. Thus, care has been taken to ensure that there is no equivalent danger to the God-like powers of root of Unix or Administrator of MS Windows.
Flow controls. Both incoming mail acceptance and outgoing mail transmission of a Merce Broadside system can be controlled by an authorised user in real time. She can stop incoming message acceptance into the Merce Broadside system from sources which submit messages. Similarly, she can start and stop transmission of outgoing messages which have been accepted by the Merce Broadside system. Outgoing flow controls can be programmed to start and stop automatically as per a 24x7 time-of-day matrix, so that organisations can take advantage of unused bandwidth at night to execute bulk transmissions. This allows the authorised user to program Merce Broadside to "transmit any queued outbound messages of the banking-Singapore application between 2300 hrs and 0600 hrs every night, Monday to Friday, and all 24 hours on weekends."
Single administration console. All applications are controlled from a single administration console. Any number of administrators can login at the same time on this administrative console in parallel using their browsers. Each administrator only gets access to the information that he is permitted to see.
