The Key Control Element – Roles

Roles are a key feature of SmartSimple and control many important aspects of the system.

Generally, you will use role-based security for the majority of your configuration needs.

Roles control the following features:

• Administrative Interface Menu – the menu items displayed in the administrative interface are controlled by role.
• Portal Interface – you can create a specific portal view for people in a specific role. This will override the display of the administrative interface.
• Field Data – you can gather different information for different roles through role-specific custom fields.
• Manager permissions – manager permissions in all applications and key features are associated with specific roles.
• Permission a role to set other roles – for example, a sales role may be able to change a "suspect" role to a "prospect" role, but not to a "customer" or “employee” role.
• When you use the Associates/Associations feature to associate a contact with an organisation to which they are not a contact, you use a role to show the relationship between the person and the organisation.
• Within the Universal Tracking Applications, roles are used to define a context specific role for a person. For example, a customer may be playing the role of project leader but only for a specific project.
• Reference the role in a collaborative workflow step. For instance, you can specify that everyone with an “Executive” role needs to approve a document before distribution.
• Locate all the people in a specific role for activities such as email broadcasting.

Notes on Roles

Before you add many users to SmartSimple, it is important to define roles.

• You can define any number of roles.
• You can associate a single user with any number of roles.
• Only a Global User Administrator or a Local User Administrator can define roles.
• Once a role is created, the administrator associates users with that roles.

Always make sure the role is defined before you use the User Import Wizard or an Autoloader to import user records. Both methods provide features that allow you to select one or more roles for the users you are uploading.

The Everyone Role

There is one built-in role – the everyone role.

• Every contact will be a member of the everyone role, regardless of the other roles you may give them.
• You can set a menu for the Everyone role but unlike other roles you cannot create a portal for everyone or provide access to reports to the Everyone role.