=Portal Building – Essentials=
==User Roles==
[[User Role|User roles]] organize or group like similar users togetherand, and in conjunction with permissions and other logic, control what people can see and do in SmartSimple. User Roles group like people together and are additive, meaning that a user may possess multiple roles, so roles need not be mutually exclusive. Typically, we group users on what they will be doing. Example: applicants, reviewers, and approvers, and by department: accounting, sales, partners.Before you can build a portal, you need to define user roles in your system. You can define new user roles by going to the menu icon '''Menu Icon''' > '''Roles and Security ''' > '''User Roles'''.
Please note we take a most restrictive approach when it comes to permissions, so if you set one role to deny something, it will supersede all other permissions. This means if a user has 3 roles, and 2 roles have permission to do something but the third role does not, the user will not be able to do that action. So as a general practice it is better to add permission then to deny permission on a role. This way, the more roles you have, the more you can see and do in the system.