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.

The wizard provides a feature that allows 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.