Having BenQ Boards at school is incredibly helpful with lessons, as they allow both teachers and students to utilize so many interactive tools and features. But since these boards are often permanent classroom fixtures, anyone can easily walk into a room and use them freely. This now brings up an essential security-related question: How much authority should you grant each user?

The answer really depends on your school’s security strategy. If your school is small enough, and it’s easy to keep tabs on how your students use the board, then just having usage guidelines should suffice. But if your boards are in environments where guests can come in at any time, then you may be opening up your school to potential data security risks.

Fortunately for schools, BenQ Boards come with security features that allow you to enforce stricter access controls.

The BenQ Account Management System (AMS) is mostly for teachers. AMS is an online platform that they can use to log in to their boards, personalize their home screens, bookmark webpages, and most importantly, link their cloud storage account for easy access to their lesson files. Administrators can also use AMS to assign roles for each user. We shall discuss this in more detail below.

On the other hand, you also have the BenQ Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform, which is designed for IT administrators. IAM is a cloud-based management console that allows admins to enforce access controls for their BenQ Boards. They can easily add and remove authorized users (either manually or by syncing with their school’s directory service) as well as assign them specific roles.

Below is the list of different user roles. But before we get to that, we must first discuss three settings that affect the level of access these users have on the BenQ Board.

When setting up their boards, IT administrators have the option to either enable or disable the AMS service for their BenQ Board. Without AMS, everyone will have the same level of user privileges and access as an administrator. This can work for very small schools with only a handful of BenQ Boards, where teachers can easily enforce usage guidelines and monitor who can access their boards at any given time. But for larger schools, we highly recommend enabling the service for better control and security.

Authentication mode is a special setting that administrators can find on AMS. When activated, this mode requires everyone to log in with a registered user account on IAM before they can use the BenQ Board or access any of its features.

IT administrators can go to their school’s AMS console and assign a special role (Restricted user or Administrator) to an individual user or user groups. When someone becomes a restricted user, they will only be able to modify the most basic BenQ Board settings, such as display brightness and volume controls. They won’t be able to tamper with critical device settings, which are normally reserved for those assigned the administrator role.

Here’s the summary of all the user roles:

Earlier we noted that there are three different settings that affect user access on BenQ Boards:

• Is AMS enabled?

• Is Authentication mode enabled?

• What roles are assigned to each user?

How you configure all three affect the types of users who can access the board, and subsequently, the level of security that comes with the level of access they have. The combination that offers the best security is when AMS and Authentication mode are enabled, and the Restricted user role is assigned to users.

The diagram and table below further explain what each combination of settings entails.