Roles: New and Improved in Cascade Server 6.0
Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 1:30pm -- Sam Beresford
As you may know, we released Cascade Server 6.0 earlier this month. Before that, we did extensive beta testing that led to some extremely helpful feedback, and now that 6.0 is officially here, we've gotten even more insight from clients who've upgraded. In our last blog entry, we expounded a bit on Sites, one of 6.0's most important new features. And since Roles may vary between Sites (a user may be a Manager on an organization's main website, but a Contributor on that organization's intranet, for instance), we've changed and improved the way Roles work in Cascade 6.0.
In Cascade Server, user capabilities in the system are governed by the Roles to which they've been assigned. Each Role provides users with certain privileges, and is assigned by an Administrator or automatically inherited if a user belongs to a particular group. And as users must be assigned specific Roles to contribute to a workflow process, Roles are also vital in ensuring that workflows, well, flow.
Custom Roles were introduced in Cascade Server 5.5, and they gave system Administrators the freedom to finetune the 40+ abilities that can be assigned to the five standard, formerly static Roles. With the release of Cascade Server 6.0, this customization has been kicked up a notch, as Administrators are now able to create completely new Roles with precise configurations of user capabilities that are specifically suited to the tasks and needs of their organization, their department, or even to an individual user. Site Roles allow Administrators to customize a user's abilities within the context of a particular Site and are a new addition in Cascade Server 6.0. Here are a few questions that users may have about the new ways in which Roles can be used:
- With the addition of Sites, how will Roles change?
With the introduction of Sites in Cascade Server 6.0, Cascade Server now features a formal organizational asset within which content is housed and managed for a particular website. Accordingly, the previous use of Roles in Cascade has changed to accommodate the differing needs of users across Sites. To address the conundrum of users requiring different roles across different Sites, there are now two types of Roles: Global and Site. Site Roles feature abilities applicable to the Site which they are assigned, and Global Roles contain the same abilities as Site Roles but are applicable in the Global (system) Area as well, and include non-Site-specific abilities like viewing the publish queue, System Preferences, and various Configurations for LDAP.
- How many Roles are now available? Do the five default Roles still exist?
The five default roles (Global Roles) in the system still exist. Cascade Server 6.0 also includes the ability to create and customize an infinite number of Site Roles to meet the needs of your organization and its users both on a Global (system) level and on a per-Site (contextual) basis.
- Can I have multiple Site (contextual) Roles?
All users are guaranteed to have at least one Global Role, and additionally, one Site Role for every Site they belong to. Both Site Roles and Global Roles may be inherited via a user's group membership, but every user will also have at least one Global Role directly assigned to them, regardless of Permissions/Role assignments and capabilities at the Site-level.
- Can the default abilities of each Role be customized?
The default abilities of each Role can be customized to grant users and groups specific abilities on a per-Site basis, and users will have at least one Site Role for every Site that they are a member of. If users are assigned different Site Roles for different Sites, their abilities will be aggregated; an ability not granted by one Role on a Site may be allowed by a Role assigned to the user on another Site.
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