Community Roles overview

Community Roles are special titles that your organization can create and then assign to your members in order to establish title-specific access permissions, such as which communities a user can access and what content a user can view in those communities.

IMPORTANT: Currently, Community Roles only define a user'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.

Notes

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

NOTE: Customers whose community site is integrated with an external AMS/CRM database ("AMS-managed") should manage their user roles in that external database only. However, AMS-managed roles do display on the Community Roles page in Admin (described below), but for referential purposes only; their Integration Keys display, but they cannot be edited or deleted.

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.

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.

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.

Create a Community Role

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

2. Give your role an appropriate name.
3. Provide a description to inform other admins as to this role's purpose. This description displays on the Community Roles page.
4. Click Save.
5. Review the list to make sure that the new role displays.

Next steps

After creating a new role, there are a few steps you must take before it can be assigned to a user. Learn about the entire process in the Assign Roles to Users section below.

Assign roles to users

Before a role can be assigned to users, you must complete a number of preliminary steps. Let's walk through the entire process:

NOTE: Multiple roles can be assigned to a user; if so, they'll receive the combined permissions afforded by each role.

Step 1 - Associate role at Community Type level

Once created, community roles are associated at the Community Type level, giving Super Admins the flexibility to make specific roles available to specific communities, which in turn ensures each community's unique needs are met.

To do so:

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Community > Communities > Types.

3. Click the Edit button associated to the Community Type for which you want to make the role available.

4. Scroll down to the Permissions section. Then, select the role from the Add Community Roles menu - check marks are displayed for each role available to the Community Type, and they're listed in the menu.

NOTE: If you're an integrated client, AMS-managed roles are not listed here; they're managed and assigned through your integration. However, you can still create separate, unique Higher Logic roles and assign those to your members. This is helpful in cases where you need a role that's not available in your AMS to fulfill a specific purpose.

5. Click Save at the bottom of the page.

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

Step 2 - Assign role from community

Community Roles are a community-based permission, so they are assigned at the community level.

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

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

NOTE: You can also assign roles to multiple users at once by checking the boxes to their left and then selecting Edit Roles from the bulk actions menu above. This option displays only on communities that have Community Roles.

4. In the popup, each available role is listed, along with a few other settings:

1. Assign the desired role(s) by toggling it to ON.
2. If needed, you can also limit how long a member has a role by setting an end date. This is helpful if, for example, you're giving a member a role for a specific task, like reviewing a number of documents in the community's Workspace, but you only want to give them this level of access for a limited time.
3. If this user is part of the community's leadership, you can toggle the Include in community leadership option to YES to give them a community leadership banner on the community's list of members (this widget is generally displayed on the community's Home page). See image below for an example.
4. If the user has multiple roles, you can select which one to highlight in the community's list of members (see image below for an example).

5. Click Save to assign the role(s) and any other settings you've applied.

Step 3 - Define role permissions

Only after a role has been assigned to at least one community member can its permissions be defined 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: As mentioned above, a newly assigned role must sync to Workspace before it displays on this page. If you don't see your role, you'll have to 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.