Roles & Tasks Update

Stephen Pilon

I am glad to see in the weekly update blog that you will be rolling out an update to how we interact with Roles and Tasks. I am even more curious to see what you be be doing with the promised future updates. One of the most frustrating aspects of role/task management is not being able to figure out what role/tasks are needed for very specific circumstances. Hopefully your updates will make this more transparent. Although I have a feeling it is not going to solve some of the problems, unless the update is going to include some changes in Roles and Tasks themselves.

Jessi Walters

@Stephen Pilon, the Core team has lots in store to release next year. Big items include:

• bringing the list of roles off the old architecture and putting it in a more modern list for sorting and filtering
• writing descriptions for all of the tasks in the system, which you'll be able to view when you're looking at the list of tasks within a role, so that you know exactly what each task enables for a user in that role.
• adding domains to the list of roles so you can easily find which roles turn on access to a specific feature
• grouping tasks into domains so that all of the tasks that affect a single feature (i.e. Directories, Content, People) will be grouped together
• adding a tile to the User access tab in Core so you can see all of the tasks to which a user has access - grouped by domain/feature
  • You'll be able to view task descriptions from here, too.
• adding a tile to the User access tab in Core to show all the Content editor groups in which a person is a member.
• surfacing Community group Leader status on the Groups tab of the user's Core profile
• bringing the various tabs of information about a role into a more modern and user-friendly UI

This is a baby step to better align with the security and permissions model that we see with other Blackbaud products like Raiser's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT. We have a lot of work to do to completely align, but this initiative will provide a deeper level of transparency that is so needed in Blackbaud Education Management. You're right - it won't make everything better, but these are the items we identified as being most critical for this first wave of changes.

Rose Mary Herbert

@Jessi Walters What will the impact be on cloned roles? We have a bunch of clones to give limited access. It is not perfect but working for us currently. I'd hate to wake up one day to find everyone has too much access or they come to me in a panic when they can no longer do certain tasks.

Stephen Pilon

@Jessi Walters, thank you for the reply and all the info. This sounds like a great baby step. Looking for to the roll-out of these new features.

Bryna Gleich

@Rose Mary Herbert:

@Jessi Walters What will the impact be on cloned roles? We have a bunch of clones to give limited access. It is not perfect but working for us currently. I'd hate to wake up one day to find everyone has too much access or they come to me in a panic when they can no longer do certain tasks.

These updates shouldn't change what the clones can do. It should make it easier to see what the clones can do and easier to tell what the clones are based on.