Resolving Error- ‘you Are Not Authorized To Perform That Operation'

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Notes Storage Format (NSF) file is a Lotus Notes database file used by Lotus Notes users to save their important email data such as emails, notes, contacts, calendars and other objects. Often these files are shared over network within an organization for sharing important business data. However, it is always ensured that the access to the file is granted only to some required personnel.

Consider a situation when you require some information urgently and the owner of the NSF file is not present at a time. When you try accessing the data from the particular protected NSF file, you receive an error message saying-
‘You are not authorized to perform that operation'
The occurrence of this error message makes Lotus Notes .NSF file inaccessible as the owner or administrator of the file has applied strong security to the file. Basically, this security is applied to avoid any illicit utilization of data in the NSF file and restrict unauthorized access of file data. Now that it is clear that the error message appeared as a lack of access privilege to the user, hence in order to resolve this issue, user required ...
... access rights for fetching required data. Additionally, if the users can somehow remove the local security over the file, he/she can easily open the NSF database and get hands on important data.

Talking of technical terms, it is well-known that Lotus Notes has an exclusive feature of Access Control List (ACL). Lotus Notes has this unique feature embedded in it, termed as Access Control List (ACL) that actually is a list of permission attached to an object. Owing to this ACL list, an administrator or owner of the Notes .NSF file can apply to a wide array of access rules for local users to access a particular file. With application of these access rules over the NSF file, the administrator or the NSF file owner is granted with the privilege to open or manage the NSF file. Owner of the file only has the right to deal, manage or open the file and no one else.
This is why, when a person not having the required privilege accesses the particular NSF file, tries to open the file, comes across an error messages that says:

‘You are not authorized to perform that operation'

There are number of third party tools available in the market that allows the user to remove local security on the NSF files so that they can continue working on with the data without wasting time on waiting for the owner of the file provide them with the access rights. Kernel for NSF local security removal software is a similar tool devised to remove local security from the NSF file. In addition to this, the software also enables the user to re-apply the local security once he/she has finished working on the file thereby resolving the "You are not authorized to perform that operation" error message.