Chapter 11. Defining Contributor Roles

What You Will Learn

In this lesson, you will

• Examine Contribute roles

• Assign roles to users

• Add new users and new roles

• Reassign users to different roles

• Specify settings for user access

• Control edit and styling options

Approximate Time

This lesson takes approximately one hour and 30 minutes to complete.

Lesson Files

Media Files

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LessonFiles/Lesson_11/images/beaty_small.jpg

Starting Files

None

Completed Files

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In the workaday world of organizations, people's jobs are broadly defined through a combination of their responsibilities and limitations. For example, a technical writer might be responsible for drafting the help documentation for a new company product, but is prohibited from publishing that documentation until it has been approved by the product manager. The product manager, in turn, has the power to approve technical specifications, but must defer any promotional copy to the marketing manager. Each of these people has a specific role in the organization.

In Macromedia Contribute, roles are a compilation of settings that determine what a contributor can and cannot do on a given Web site. Contribute roles are function based and, like jobs, relate to the contributor's actual tasks and restrictions. For example, a department manager is likely to be responsible for the department's intranet, and her Contribute role should include publishing privileges. An administrative assistant in the same department, however, need only implement requested Web page changes. Moreover, the assistant's work must be approved by the manager. The assistant's role should be limited to editing and submitting pages for review (but not publishing directly to the site). Both rolesmanager and assistantcan be restricted to work within the boundaries of the department's portion of the intranet.

After Contribute Publishing Services is installed, you gain a tremendous degree of flexibility when managing users and their roles.

The Contribute site Administrator is responsible for creating, defining, and assigning roles to users. In the Administrator's hands, roles become a powerful tool for shaping Contribute to fit the organization's structure. In this lesson, you'll learn how to work with roles from start to finish. You'll see how to assign existing roles and how to create new ones. To use roles most effectively, it's important that you know which options are available to you; all of the definable properties of a role are covered in this lesson.