How to Bypass the Password When Opening a Spooled Report Outside of Elliott

How to Bypass the Password When Opening a Spooled Report Outside of Elliott

Release: 6/17/2021
Version: 8.0 & Up

Q - I understand that Elliott Reports are stored in the <ElliottRoot>\Reports\99\.... folders where 99 is the company ID. I tried to navigate to the corresponding folder and find those spooled reports that are stored in the ZIP format.  When I opened it, it prompted me for a password.  See sample screen below:


What is the password?   How do I bypass this password?

A - The spooled reports are saved in the <ElliottRoot>\Reports folder. It may contain sensitive information (like financial statements or payroll register…etc.) For sure, the Windows system admin (IT) will have full rights to access the folder. But the system admin should have no business seeing financial statements or payroll registers. Therefore, we did two things with spooled reports:
  1. We zipped the spooled reports to save disk space;
  2. We assigned a password (every customer is different) to the Zip file.
Because of 2, the Windows system admin can’t simply unzip the report and see the contents.

On the other hand, if you have Elliott admin rights (e.g., SUPERVISOR or equivalent), you will be able to see that report from the Spooled Report Manager. In addition, if an Elliott admin wants to shared that report with others, he/she can right click on that report and unzip it through the Spooled Report Manager (not from Windows Explorer).  See sample screen below:

From that point on, the spooled report is stored in TXT format, which takes up more disk space and there's no security against the Windows System admin seeing it.

There’s a special algorithm to determine that password based on the user’s license ID. So the password is different for different Elliott license sites. 

The bottom line is this: The design of spooled reports is such that the admin user is Elliott's admin, not the Windows system admin.


EMK


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