11 – Roles > 11.1 About role management

About role management

A role in Viewpoint is simply a collection of permissions (see Permissions for a list of Viewpoint permissions). Once the permissions have been assigned, a role is assigned to users or user groups in a tenant. This means that each user in the tenant will be bound by the role permissions. For more information, see About tenant management.

Use case

For example, let's say that you, the system administrator, have a company of 30 employees: 5 managers, 20 engineers, and 5 interns. There may be pages or Viewpoint reports that you want engineers to be able to access, but that you do not want interns to access. Likewise, there may be pages or reports that you want managers to be able to access, but no one else. Here is what you would do:

Create three roles: "manager," "engineer," and "intern."
Assign the permissions you want for each role.
Create three tenants (one for the five managers, one for the 20 engineers, and one for the five interns), and assign the corresponding role to each tenant. For more information, see Creating a new tenant.

There are two types of roles in Viewpoint: global roles and tenant roles. Global roles include system-wide permissions, while tenant roles restrict permissions within a certain tenant. For example, if you created a global role and included the "Power on/off all nodes" permission, then a user assigned that role would have permissions to power on or off any node in the entire system, including nodes outside his or her tenant. A tenant role, however, with the same permission to power on/off nodes is restricted to be able to power on or off nodes that are assigned to his or her tenant only.

Viewpoint is delivered with default roles:

Administrator: This role is a global role that enables all possible permissions.
PowerUser: This role is a tenant role that enables permissions to access all administration pages, as well as permissions to manage service templates.
User: This role is a tenant role that enables permissions for users to submit resources they have access to, and to view and modify their own services.

For a full list of the permissions contained in each role, see Permissions.

You can edit, copy, or delete any of the delivered default roles. However, if you ever want to revert to the default roles, reset the roles on the Set Viewpoint Defaults configuration page (for more information, see Resetting default roles and permissions).

You can manage roles on the Role Management page (Administration > Role Management).