About principal and alternate accounts

Associating alternate accounts with a principal account allows Clinical Research Organization (CRO) customers to avoid separate logins by enterprise and to provide improved reporting across the enterprises.

A principal account is an account that has an associated alternate account. An alternate account is an account that is linked to a principal account. Alternate accounts are essentially aliases to use when performing activities on behalf of the CRO customer. You create the alternate accounts within the login group that corresponds to the CRO customer enterprise. By associating alternate accounts with principal accounts, CRO users of Oracle Empirica can keep their Principal Account for CRO-level activities but use an Alternate Account to perform CRO-Signal-level activities such as Signal Review or Signal Assessment. The CRO user can quickly switch between their principal account and any of their alternate accounts without logging out of Empirica and logging back in.

Alternate accounts behave like non-alternate accounts allowing Products, Product-Event Combinations, Topics, and other objects to be assigned to them. Alternate accounts can only be created for principal accounts. Only one level of alternates is supported; that is, alternate accounts cannot be created for other alternate accounts. Alternate accounts can never have superuser privileges.

You can identify principal and alternate accounts on the Edit Users page by adding two columns to the User list with the Columns link at the top of the page. Both are set to Available as a default.

• Principal Name: Only populated for an alternate account. It indicates which principal account the alternate account belongs to.
• Alternate Count:
  • A 1 or greater number in the cell means the account is acting as a principal account.
  • A 0 means the account is not acting as a principal account.

Alternate account usernames must be unique. When creating a single alternate account, there is no restriction on the alternate account username. When creating alternate accounts in bulk, the alternate account usernames will have a one to five-character suffix to uniquely identify the alternate account. This suffix is obtained from the Short Name field from the Edit Login Group page.