Restrict communication within your Symphony instance

Restricting communication between select Symphony users on your Symphony instance can be achieved using Information Barriers (IB). In simple terms, IBs restrict certain people from communicating with one another when applied to groups within a policy.

Check the latest version of the Symphony Admin Guide for information on how to configure an IB.

Example: Applying Information Barriers

We will use an example of 2 IB groups:

• Group A will contain the users that can only communicate with certain users.
• Group B will contain all internal users, except for those the restricted users need to communicate with. This will block users from Group A from communicating with any internal users except those they need to speak to in Group B.

4. Select Information Barriers under Compliance.

5. Select Enable.
6. Navigate to the Group Management tab and select Create an IB group.

7. Create one group with the new users, for example Group A.
8. Create another group, for example Group B, by adding all internal users excluding the certain users required for the new users to communicate with.
9. Navigate to the Policy Management tab and select Create an IB Policy.

10.  In Group 1 select Group A and in Group 2, select Group B.
11. To complete the IB Policy activation select Create IB Policy.

Some tasks can be executed via REST APIs. The most useful endpoints are:

• List IB Groups
• List IB Group Members
• Add IB Group Members - Allows you to add all members to the group of all the users, and thereafter remove the required users from it.
• Remove IB Group Members
• List Policies

Prerequisites for using APIs:

1. Enable a new service account (see Creating a Service Account).
2. Generate an RSA KeyPair and add the Public Key to the newly created service account (see Create an RSA Key Pair).
3. Obtain the Private Key when authenticating with the service account.
4. Obtain a Postman Collection containing all our REST API endpoints (see Symphony Postman Collection).
5. Obtain list of the active userIds on the Symphony instance (see How to export a list of Symphony users) to be able to add all users.
6. Format the userIds to be compatible with the input required to add users to the group in the Add IB Group Members API endpoint.

If you have any questions regarding restricting communication within your Symphony instance, please contact Symphony Support at support@symphony.com.