Plan your security setup

When planning your organisation's ideal security setup, it’s a good idea to brainstorm among senior staff and write down your proposed structure.

Overview

The group that users belong to determines the features and information they can access. If a group’s rights change, the rights of the users in that group change too.

You can create exceptions for specific users, but this can become messy over time.

Instead of setting up exceptions, it is often easier to create a group for just one user, even if they will be the only person in that group.

Plan the security setup

  1. Read about How security works.

  2. Make a list of everyone who needs to access Vernon CMS.

  3. Sort these people into broad groups that need similar access or restrictions.

  4. Starting with the group with the least rights, list the fields, records, or features that they should or should not have access to.

    • For example, the Volunteer group should not have access to valuation or location fields. They can create reports, but not use any bulk tools.

  5. Write down the next group and list what those users should or should not access.

  6. Continue doing this with all of your broad groups or users. Check to see if any of the groups have similar access levels and could be combined into one.

  7. Review the users who are members of each group and decide if any of them should have more rights or should not have some rights.

    • If either situation is the case, consider making them members of a different group instead, or create a new group for just that user.

  8. Organise your groups into a hierarchy. Start at the lowest group and figure out what is the next higher group.

    • A group automatically inherits any rights that the group below it has. So if you allow the Public group to view records, then the next group up (Cataloguers) can view records automatically.

    • By creating a hierarchy, you only have to add additional rights to each higher group, rather than having to assign the full security to every level.

Create the users and groups

You are now ready to set up your security.