Community Roles overview

Community Roles is an optional feature with which Super Admins can create special "titles" for their organization and then assign them to the members in order to establish title-specific access permissions, such as which communities a member can access and what content a member can view in those communities.

IMPORTANT: Currently, Community Roles only define a member's level of access to a community's Workspace. See Workspace Overview to learn more. In the future, their use may expand to other Higher Logic modules.

Community Roles and AMS-managed communities

Community Roles are intended for customers whose community site is HL-managed (i.e., it is not integrated with an external AMS/CRM database).

Customers whose community site is integrated with an external AMS/CRM database ("AMS-managed") should manage their member roles in that external database only.

However:

• your AMS-managed roles will display on the Community Roles page in Admin (described below), but they cannot be edited or deleted there; their Integration Keys display, but are for referential purposes only.
• you can create separate, unique Higher Logic roles and assign them to your members. This is helpful in cases where you need a role to fulfill a specific purpose, but that role does not exist in your AMS.

Notes

Community Roles are assigned at the Community Type level, which gives Super Admins the ability to customize and manage which roles are available to which communities.

• A Community Role can be assigned to multiple Community Types.
• A Community Type can have multiple Community Roles.
• A Community Role can be assigned to multiple community members.
• A community member can have multiple Community Roles.
• A community member who has been assigned multiple Community Roles has the cumulative permissions of all of those roles.

Super Admins can:

• create Community Roles.
• customize the appearance of user profiles for each Community Role.
• assign Community Roles to members of any community.

Community Admins can:

• assign Community Roles to members of their community only.

Getting started with Community Roles

There are four high-level steps to setting up Community Roles. These are listed below in their required order and then detailed in dedicated sections in this article.

1. Create a Community Role
2. Add the Community Role to a Community Type
3. Assign the Community Role to one or more members from within a community
4. Define the permissions for the Community Role

Access your Community Roles

To access your Community Roles:

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Community > Communities > Roles.

The Community Roles list page displays the roles in your account.

Manage your Community Roles

Select a role in the list to enable the page-top options, then click:

• Edit to change its name and description.
• Delete, followed by Delete in the confirmation pop-up, to permanently remove the role.

Step 1 - Create a Community Role

1. Click the plus sign to the right of the page title.

2. Specify an appropriate name for the role.
3. Provide a description that informs other Admins of this role's purpose. This displays on the Community Roles page.
4. Click Save.
5. Review the list and verify that the new role displays.

Step 2 - Add the role to a Community Type

Community Roles are added to Community Types. All communities of that Type then automatically have those Community Roles.

NOTE: If a community has Type-based roles and its Type is changed, its existing roles are automatically replaced with the roles of its new Type.

To add a role to a Community Type:

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Community > Communities > Types.

3. Click to select the Community Type to which you want to add the role and click the Edit button.

4. On the Edit Community Type overlay dialog, scroll down to the Permissions section.

5. Click into the field below Add Roles and select the role from the list that displays.

• Add any other roles you want.
• Click the small x to delete a role.

6. Click Save at the bottom of the page.

The Community Roles that you have selected are now available to be assigned to members of all communities that are of this Community Type.

Step 3 - Assign roles to members from within the community

Community Roles are a community-based permission, so they are assigned to community members from within the associated community.

NOTE: If you assign multiple roles to a community member, the member will have the cumulative permissions of all of those roles.

1. Navigate to a community.
2. Click Settings, and then click Members.

3. Click a member's Edit Roles button (in the Actions column) to manage (assign, remove) that member's role assignments.

NOTE: You can also simultaneously manage roles for multiple users by checking their boxes and then selecting Edit Roles from the Select action dropdown. This option displays only on communities that have Community Roles.

The available roles are listed on the Edit Roles dialog, along with a few other settings.

4. Check the boxes for any roles that you want to assign to the selected member. You can also:

• click the calendar icons to specify start and end dates for the role assignment for this member, as shown;

TIP: This is helpful if, for example, a member is filling in during an absence or has been given a task that requires temporary access and/or view permissions.

• check the Include in community leadership box to give the member the community leadership banner and have them included in the Community Leaders widget.
• click the dropdown to select which one (of several roles) to highlight in the community's Members Directory.
• check either or both boxes to make this member a Community Admin and/or a Community Moderator.

5. Click Save to apply your settings.
6. Review the Roles column of the Members page to ensure that the changes you've made display as expected.

Step 4 - Define a role's permissions

The final step is to define the role's permissions in the Admin interface.

NOTE: After a role has been assigned to a user, it will take a period of time for it to sync to Workspace.

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Workspace > Group Roles.

3. Click the role's associated modify link on the right.

NOTE: A newly assigned role must sync to Workspace before it displays on this page. If you don't see your role, wait for the sync to complete.

4. On the resulting page, you can define the following role permissions.

5. Click Update at the bottom of the page to save the role's permissions.