Groups Roles and Permissions Overview

To allow particular users access to specific parts of the functionality (and to block users from parts of the functionality that they should not have access to), the majority of the functionality within Forsta Plus is controlled by permissions. This allows for example, a particular user to be allocated a specific set of permissions to enable him or her to perform their job whilst preventing them from accessing other areas where a mistake could delete respondent data.

To simplify the allocation of permissions to large numbers of users, individual users who have similar jobs and therefore require similar permissions can be collected into logically-named Groups. One Group could for example be Administrators.

In addition, separate permissions that would be needed by all users with similar responsibilities can be gathered into Roles (go to Roles for more information). For example, all the permissions required to perform the Administrator's job could be gathered into a Role called 'Administrator'. Once the Groups and Roles have been defined and created, it is then a relatively simple job to allocate Roles to Groups.

Note: To prevent accidents, when assigning privileged rights (Administrator rights) to professional users, groups or roles, you must have secondary approval by a privileged user. This approval is applied via 2-factor authentication. Refer to the Authoring User Guide for further details.

Once the Groups of users have been allocated Roles, you can then fine-tune the system by adding additional permissions as required to specific users.

In the Group Management and Role Management pages, there is one Available column and one Selected column. To add a Group, a Role, a Permission or a Member to a Group or to add a permission to a Role, in the appropriate Available field, highlight the items that you wish to allocate to the group and click the >> button. The selected items are moved across to the Selected fields and are allocated to the Group/Role.

To de-select items, highlight them in the Selected field and click the << button. The selected items are moved across to the Available field.

Most of the permissions also determine which Forsta Plus menus the user will see and have access to. The menus and areas to which the user does not have access, will in most cases not be visible to the user. In a few cases the user will have read-only access to functionality.

Note: With the introduction of the Standard user (which required considerable simplification of the functionality and user interface), a large number of additional permissions became necessary to close off areas of the functionality that are not needed by Standard users. These permissions, mainly denoted FEATURE_, will normally be required for users other than Standard users.