Manage Kontent.ai users programmatically with the Subscription API

Content management has a lot of moving parts. Whatever your organization is building toward, people make it happen. And with teams becoming more distributed, it’s important to have the ability to oversee and control who’s involved at every stage of the process. 

There’s too much on the line to handle these operations this manually. So what’s non-negotiable when it comes to streamlining and governing user management in your headless CMS? 

• Central oversight of all users: Enables administrators to manage access and activity efficiently from one unified interface, improving control and accountability.
• Granular permissions and user roles for projects, collections, spaces, and environments: Ensures the right users have the appropriate level of control, reducing errors and enhancing content security.
• Single Sign-on and multifactor authentication with your preferred user identity provider: Strengthens security while simplifying the login process, reducing friction for users and easing IT overhead.
• Multiple workflows with different users, roles, and approvals involved: Supports complex team structures and approval hierarchies, ensuring consistent governance and smoother collaboration.
• Automation of user management that integrates with existing systems: Streamlines onboarding and offboarding processes, minimizing manual effort and ensuring consistency across platforms.

Let’s dive more deeply into the last point—the automation of user management—and zoom in on a key product feature: the ability to work with the same user management capabilities through the Subscription API as you do in the Kontent.ai platform.

Managing Kontent.ai users with the Subscription API

The Subscription API, part of the Management API, is a secure REST API that provides read and write access to your Kontent.ai project. The API endpoints make it easy to synchronize users and their permissions across projects under your subscription and perform batch operations. They’re also useful for integrating Kontent.ai user management within your own internal tools, systems, and programs. 

Whether you're working with multiple Kontent.ai projects or integrating content workflows into your broader tech stack, programmatic user management ensures consistency and scalability. It removes the need to manually mirror permissions across projects, saving time and reducing the chance of misconfiguration.

Managing users via code keeps users systematically curated and organized, which is especially critical for smooth transitional activities, like onboarding and offboarding. With the Subscription API:

• Export a list of users
• Invite users to a project
• Set user roles
• Activate or deactivate users

This feature greatly improves how project administrators manage large teams of users, without added manual work. Refer to the API documentation to get started with subscription-level user management.

Synchronizing user management across the organization

For large-scale enterprise operations, it’s critical to have user management centralized under a user identity provider. This practice ensures the organization’s structure is reflected across every solution in your tech stack. Synchronizing user management from one central point, instead of configuring it manually for each and every service, is the only way to be truly confident in your setup. 

This centralization also supports compliance and audit-readiness by ensuring access controls are consistently applied. With identity provider integration, permissions are no longer tied to individual tools; they’re governed organization-wide, reducing risk and administrative overhead.

Subscription administrators can also now integrate Kontent.ai user permissions with their user identity provider through the Subscription API. This allows your organization to:

• Move faster and scale up, as there's no longer a need to duplicate configurations of an organizational structure in Kontent.ai
• Manage organizational restructuring or individual transitions stress-free because Kontent.ai automatically updates user permissions
• Ensure secure management of Kontent.ai users with a single source of truth for permissions

If you’re interested in the Subscription API and it's not available in your current plan, get in touch with your customer success manager.