This functionality is available for User Administrators.
Author Custom User Roles (CURs) offer you an under the hood view of all the permissions that make up the Author system role. The functionality allows you to create your own user role that can be granted to your Authors, giving them just the right amount of power over the content.
Think of them like any other user role in Inspera, except you have chosen what actions the role will control.
Combined with Access Groups for Item Banks they can be used to ensure that only the right people see the right content and can do appropriate actions with it.
This article will detail how you can create, edit, delete Custom User Roles, as well as how you can assign them to users.
Limitations
A user with a CUR will not be able to access the Author module based on this role alone. The Author CURs are linked to Item Banks. If the user is not a member of an Access Group that is added to an Item Bank along with the specific CUR permission, the user will not be able to access any content.
Creating an Author CUR
Under settings, select 'Custom user roles'. Note: you require the Administrator user role to access this setting.
Within the CUR dashboard click the 'Create New' button.
Under 'Details' - give your Author CUR a name and description. The role ID is auto-generated. At current state it is in 'Draft'.
The 'Settings' tab is where you will choose the permissions that make up this Custom User Role. Firstly, mark the Author tab as 'Enabled' to view your options.
The CUR interface is separated into sections and certain permissions have dependencies (see Author Custom User Roles: Available Permissions for fuller details to help guide you). The sections and permissions that are visible to you are dependent on the configurations you have set for your tenancy, which means you will only ever see options that are relevant to your institution.
Once you have chosen the permissions for your new Custom User Role, select 'Publish now'. Publishing the user role means that it can be granted to your users' profiles and selected within the Item Bank properties screen.
If at any stage in the future you wish to unpublish the CUR, you can simply use the button at the top of the screen.
Unpublishing a CUR will mean that the CUR is no longer visible to assign to new users and also not searchable within the Item Bank modal. Any users who have been previously assigned this CUR to grant them access to an Item Bank will lose access to the Item Bank once the CUR moves back to Draft.
Starter CURs
To give you a head start with your use of Author CURs, we will provide you with three Starter CURs when the Item Bank functionality is enabled on your tenancy. These will conform to the three most standard configurations for Authors:
- Author View Only Access CUR
- Author View and Edit Only Access CUR
- Author Full Access CUR
These Starter CURs are yours to own and work with as you see fit. You can publish them for immediate use with your Item Banks and Access Groups, or edit them to make them more applicable to your needs, or even delete them entirely if you would prefer to only make your own.
See Author Custom User Roles: Available Permissions for more information about permissions.
Editing an Author CUR
To edit an existing Author CUR, simply click on the CUR, re-open the Details or Settings tab and make your required changes, then select 'Close' (top right of the screen). You can make edits even if the CUR is still in a published state. Alternatively you can unpublish the CUR before making edits, by using the button at the top right of the screen. While published, any changes you make take effect immediately.
Unpublishing a CUR will mean that the CUR is no longer visible to assign to new users and also not searchable within the Item Bank modal. Any users who have been previously assigned this CUR to grant them access to an Item Bank will lose access to the Item Bank once the CUR moves back to Draft.
The now unpublished CUR will still show as granted on the user's profile. If you wish to remove the CUR from one or multiple user profiles then please do this via the User Administration screen.
Deleting an Author CUR
Before deleting a CUR, first consider whether simply unpublishing it would be sufficient (see section above)
To delete a CUR, select the checkbox next to the relevant CUR and click 'Delete' in the bottom action panel.
You will be asked to confirm the action before proceeding.
Please note that deleting a role takes a few minutes, and you may get a timeout error in a red banner at the top of the page. Just ignore this error, the deletion will continue behind the scenes.
Assigning an Author CUR to users
Any published CUR will show within the 'User roles' list on the user profile. You can assign a user this CUR by ticking the checkbox for that CUR and saving the changes. This works in the same way as assigning any other user role, as described in the relevant Help Center article.
For more info on managing access to an Item Bank, see the Access tab for Item Bank Management.
Next steps
See Advanced Access Controls for Item Banks to learn how Author Custom User Roles can be attributed to Access Groups to grant access to Item Banks.