In Kontent.ai, every user is assigned a role that defines their permissions within the platform. Role permissions cover all critical aspects, from viewing content to managing content types. This lesson explains the importance of mapping out how your organization works now or will work in the future before setting up your team’s roles.
Why mapping permissions is important
Knowing who will work on each task and where the responsibilities lie is crucial. Without clearly understanding who's doing what, incomplete tasks and bottlenecks can hinder your content creation efforts.A Copywriter, Editor, Graphic Designer, System Administrator, and Developer are just a few roles that access content and content software within a company. Yet, it is unlikely for all the roles to need the same permissions. By setting up roles in your company, you'll connect communication silos and enable your company to work effectively with content.
How to map permissions
Let's identify responsibilities from the permission areas' point of view:
The administration permissions – for the configuration and maintenance of the content project
The content permissions – for working with the content within the project
Although there might be some overlap, the goals of the respective areas are quite different. Let’s imagine a typical front office. When a customer walks in, the product they are looking for is information on products or perhaps assistance with them. But to achieve that goal, there needs to be a physical building first, with a convenient environment inside. If there is an issue with the office layout or the Internet goes down, it’s not your front office specialists who address the problem.The online project you're building follows the same pattern. Let your content specialists focus on what they can do best, and as far as maintenance goes, let your developers or strategists shine.These are typical tasks that fall into the two respective areas:
Administration
Content
Configure and update the content model
View content
Manage users, roles, and workflows
Create content
Manage subscription plans
Edit content
Manage APIs
Delete content
Who’s suitable for administration permissions
These permissions are typically for administrators and developers of your project. At the beginning of your project implementation, those are also the people that will have access to Kontent.ai first.The predefined Project manager role is a good start as its permissions are unlimited. This way, everyone that’s in the project from the beginning can explore the possibilities of Kontent.ai. For further implementation and later production phases, it's useful to assign these permissions only to those who need to change core properties and are aware of their impact. Changing content types, managing APIs, and other permissions may break your apps if mishandled.
Subscription admin
The only users that have more permissions than the Project manager are the Subscription admins. Subscription admins are users that have full permissions over the subscription that contains the project. These permissions include changing the subscription plan and payment details. The Subscription admin is the Project manager in all the projects within the subscription to guarantee full permissions over the whole Kontent.ai configuration.For the Subscription admin, choose the content owner at your company, the technical owner of Kontent.ai, or both. As Subscription admins can delete projects, do not use the admin for more users than needed.
Who's suitable for content permissions
The smaller your content-related team is, the easier your content permission model will be. In such cases, it's typical to let people access most of the content and allow them to do nearly all actions with the content as their tasks overlap.However, with more complex teams and more content produced, you'll typically divide people into groups that will always be allowed to create, modify, or delete specific parts of your content only. To do that, it's important to understand your organization and how you’d like your content teams to interact. Try to answer this list of questions:Answers to those questions are now the base for your content permission setup.
What's next?
Design roles
When identifying roles, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of the users’ responsibilities. By designing such roles for your projects, you’ll be able to clarify what each role is accounted for and what their main tasks are.
Publishing permissionsIf you're looking for publishing permissions, those are part of the workflow. Workflows contain steps that indicate the state of your content item. The next learning path dives deeper into workflows and how you can use them to establish publishing permissions effectively.
Allow changes to assigned content onlyIn Kontent.ai, you can assign content directly to users. If your team’s strategy involves assigning specific tasks to specific people, you can configure that in roles as well.For example, an external contributor, such as a translator, doesn't need to see or modify all content. You’ll rather pick and choose what content the translator is supposed to work on and once complete, you will assign other content to them.
