There’s a fine balance between having too few and too many administrative users. Create a plan to differentiate those who should be empowered Slate users from those who should just view portals or fill out forms.

First, meet with those with decision-making responsibilities and speak to all potential users. Pose these questions to the attendees and document the following:

Who needs to:

• Build forms, events, and emails in Slate?

• See full records?

• See specific sets of data but not full records?

• See certain types of data?

• Review records and submit forms?

This process is just the beginning of the overall design. Your goal is to consider your internal operations, referring to who does what, and when and how they do it.

If you have not already done so, refer to a data map of your organization’s operations. Reviewing this and inserting roles (not staff members) into the data map empowers you to understand who does what and when.

This article discusses user types, how to add a user, how to configure the settings for those accounts, and more. To get started, create a document accessible to your Slate implementation team and anyone else in the jurisdiction who will have a say in deciding who should access Slate information and how they should access it.

Understand the options for setting up a new user. The following definitions are described in more detail in the related articles:

Role - How can permissions be grouped to match a user’s title or type? Permissions can be granted individually, but by using roles, you can sustainably manage groups of users.

For example, if Faculty Advisors should all have the same permissions, create a role called “Faculty Advisors.” Assign the appropriate permissions to the role and assign the role to the user. Should the access requirements for this role change, you can manage it at the role level rather than editing each user account. Other role examples could be Gift Officer, Student Worker, or Athletics.

Permissions - What can a user do? At the most granular level, individual permissions can be assigned to a user.

Population - To whom can it be done? Access to records in Slate can be managed through population permissions for each user account. Users can be granted access to look up or update records that belong to specific populations rather than being granted access to look up or update all records in a database. 

For example, a faculty advisor in the History department should only be able to look up and access records for History majors. By assigning population permissions, access levels to records based on population can be managed for many users in a single database.

Realm - Which objects can it be done to? While standard permissions will grant access to a given function, realms enable more targeted functional access restrictions to only objects in the realm.

For example, if a user has access to manage their own Deliver campaigns but only for their one department, the “Edit All Mailings” permission could enable a user to see all mailings universally. By placing a departmental mailing into a realm, the user can edit just the mailings in their department without seeing or affecting mailings in other realms.

Tip

When you provision the Clean Slate environment to view one of the model databases (such as Admissions, Student Success, or Advancement), we encourage you to navigate to the User Permissions section of the model’s Database tool. Review the types of user roles, realms, and permissions that have been created and use them as a guide to set up your user permissions plan.

Community Support

The members of the Slate community provide a wealth of information when it comes to shared experiences and lessons learned. Take advantage of those who have already built their user permissions.

Forums

In our Community Forums, search for posts related to user permissions, roles, and realms. Create a new post specific to your questions or organizational scenarios and allow Community Ambassadors and users to respond with recommendations and examples.

Conversations

Review the Community Conversation Calendar in Home Slate and look for upcoming permissions-related sessions. Submit questions in your registration form so the Client Support Engineers (moderators) can include that information in their agenda. Come prepared to speak to your user permissions plan, ask questions, and participate in the conversation, and you will leave with a clearer picture of how to move forward in building out your user permissions.

Continuing Education

Learning Lab

Sign in to the Learning Lab and look for additional courses your team members have yet to take regarding user permissions.

Build in the affirmative!

Consider what should a user be able to do. The granular permissions in Slate cause the things users should not do to naturally fall out of their scope.