User Permissions and Access Rights
The management of permissions and access rights is the most complicated
element of ]project-open[
because it really is a management of trust relationships. There
is a dilema between:
- Access: Users should have access to all information and documents
necessary to do their job.
- Restriction: Users should not have access to more information
then necessary to do their job.
To solve this dilema ]project-open[
introduces three types of access permissions:
- "User Profiles" which correspond to department membership
in a company
- "Project Roles" which correspond to the function of
the user in a specific project and
- "User Hierarchy" which corresponds to the hierarchy
in the company.
Each of these concepts are explained below.
User Profiles
User profiles correspond to department membership in the company
or business partners respectively.
The figure above depicts the different types of User Profiles:
- Senior Management: The management of the company with access
to all corporate information
- Project Managers: Employees with special skills to manage projects
- Employees: Employees from several departments such as sales,
operations, ...
- Finance: Employees with access to invoices and other financial
information
- Freelancers: External users who can take part in specific projects.
Freelancers have basicly no access rights outside the specific
projects they take part of.
- Clients: External users with permissions similar to Freelancers.
Please note that the groups Employees, Freelancers and Clients
are mutally exclusive.
Project Roles
Project roles define access permissions to project on a case-by-case
base. Project roles are particularly useful for "Freelancers"
and "Clients" with normally very restricted access to
the system.
The figure above depicts a "Project B" that involves
project members from both the provider and the customer side.
Project Roles can be extended and customized for a specific company.
However, a number of predefined project roles exist:
- Administrator:
The administrator of a project can assign new users to the project
and change its main characteristics. Also, the enjoys full read
and write access to all associated components such as discussion
forums and filestorage.
- Member:
A member has access to all information of a business object but
is not allowed to administer the object.
]project-translation[
for example adds several translation specific roles such as:
- Translator
- Editor
- Proof Reader
User Hierarchy
The user hierarchy determines which user has the right to "administer"
(change the password and email, ...) other users. The hierarchy
consists of:
- System Administrator
- Senior Management
- Employees
- Freelancers and Customers
Being able to administer a user is particularly useful in cases
where the user has forgotten his password or has otherwise problems
to work with the system.
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