Understanding the difference between permissions, roles and groups will streamline how you set up your schools publishers and communicators.
User permissions are handled much the same as they were with only a UI facelift to make things a little easier to understand. Before you set up permissions for your website publishers and communicators, it's best to have a firm grasp on how permissions are handled in SchoolStatus. Let's distinguish the difference between permissions, roles and groups.
Permission
A permission grants access to a specific function in the platform. For example, you can grant permission for a user to send out a general message, but not an urgent message, like the following;
Role
A role is a collection of permissions. There are two types of roles in SchoolStatus Sites. A CMS role establishes permissions related to feed and web content publishing. A Notification role establishes permissions related to messaging and communications. Each type has relevant permissions that can be assigned within it.
You can create and name a role in SchoolStatus Sites, then assign multiple permissions to it. The role can then be applied to a user within a department, or to it can be applied to a permissions group (explained below).
The example below grants these notification permissions to a role named "Full Notifications Access."
Note: Multiple roles can be applied to a user or to a permission group. This will assign the permissions within each role to a user or group.
Group
Users can be made members of permission groups to quickly and easily grant the proper permissions to a user under the specified school or department. For example, if you have five people who should have the same permissions under a school or department, it makes more sense to create this group and make those five people members of it. If a new permission needs to be granted or removed, you would do it to the group, and all its members would be affected. You can also assign both CMS and Notification roles to a group... effectively granting website and notifications permissions to all the group members.
The example below grants all the users of the group full notifications access and publisher access to only Williams High School.
Note: Users can be members of multiple permission groups in which case, the user will inherit all the permissions under the school or department in which they are applied.