About Privileges and Roles

The operations you can perform, and the object classes you can perform them on, are determined by the privileges and/or role assignments that have been defined for your user.

A privilege is a function or action that a user or group can perform, such as editing the content of items or managing lifecycles. There are privilege rules that you can specify in the Administration Console for each privilege that determine which users can perform specific functions, and under what conditions. For example, the ability to update a design part can be restricted to the user who originally created the design part or any member of the ADMIN group.

A role consists of a collection of privileges that can be assigned to a user or group. For example, if you are assigned the role of PRODUCT-MANAGER, you can perform all the functions permitted for that role, for example, deleting or renaming a product.

Differences between roles and privileges:

- You can assign the same role to different users for different design parts or subordinate design parts.

- You can assign different roles to different transitions in the lifecycle of an object type, thus enabling different people to be responsible for the various stages in the approval process within that lifecycle.

- You can control who can perform a specific task more precisely using privileges. For example, you could explicitly allow only a particular user to edit lifecycle definitions.

In Dimensions CM 14.x, all implicit privilege definitions that used to be encapsulated in role definitions and inboxes have now been made explicit and grantable to users, roles, or groups based on certain rules. This help achieve maximum flexibility when enabling certain users to perform specific tasks.

IMPORTANT! Certain system roles, for example, PRODUCT-MANAGER, CHANGE-MANAGER, PARTS-CONTROLLER, and WORKSET-MANAGER, still retain their implicit abilities, although in some circumstances these abilities can be changed by altering the default privilege setup.

For a description of privileges, see Privilege Reference.

For a description of the rules that can be used to determine when specific privileges apply, see Privilege Rules.

For details about assigning roles and privileges in the Administration Console, see Users and Roles.

Related Topics

Managing Privileges

Managing Roles