How to implement/hack security on SmartTarget promotions?

Question

We have a SmartTarget implementation where different business units will be managing promotions. They should not be able to see or edit each other's promotions. Judging by the SmartTarget documentation, a user can be given the rights to Manage Promotions globally (its set on the publication target type), but there doesn't seem to be any finer level of control to prevent them viewing/editing particular promotions.

I tried creating a promotion on a publication that another user did not have access to, but this was still visible to that other user (there were GUI error shown, but I could view and open the promotion for editing).

My initial questions are:

1. Am I right in thinking that this level of security is not currently possible?
2. Is it on the Roadmap for future SmartTarget releases, and if so any clues as to how it might be controlled?

The BUs actually work in the same publications, so I don't want publication based security, but rather Region based (each BU works with regions prefixed with a particular value, eg Sports.RegionName Commerce.RegionName ). I was thinking to implement a GUI extension/hack to filter the list of promotions based on this BU-based region prefix. There is already a promotion filter capability in the GUI, so I was hoping that this might not be too hard, but I have no idea where to start - any tips would be appreciated. Another idea I had was to extend the SmartTarget webservice to filter the list of promotions/regions returned from Fredhopper, but I guess there is no context of the current logged in user there is there?

Answer 1

This was pretty easy to achieve with a GUI Extension Data Extender, which filtered the lists of regions and promotions sent from the CMS to the SmartTarget GUI.

I used normal Tridion Group membership with specially named groups to manage the set of region prefixes that a given user was allowed to work with.

Full details of the implementation are found in this article.