; In a shared workspace, the workspace and the objects it contains are edited jointly by the various members of the workspace. The access rights in the workspace regulate which actions a particular member may perform. Access rights are assigned to members by roles (Manager, Member, Restricted Member, etc.) that they receive when they are invited. For example, by default, normal members may invite additional members and remove existing members, restricted members may not; restricted members have read-only access to the objects of a shared workspace, normal members may modify objects and create new objects.
The default access rights can be changed by a manager of the workspace by allowing additional actions for certain roles or by excluding actions. For example, you can make it so that only managers can manage workspace membership or that restricted members can upload new documents.
The access rights defined via the roles are inherited by all objects contained in a workspace, i.e. also by all subfolders and the objects contained therein. However, the access rights can also be changed for certain objects, e.g. by the manager specifying for a certain subfolder that normal members also have read-only access. This regulation then applies again to all objects contained in this subfolder.
Note: Access rights to documents are often restricted because they are to be protected against accidental overwriting or deletion. BSCW offers simpler ways to avoid this besides the somewhat complex modification of access rights:
•temporarily lock the
document with;
•Freezing
the document with ;
•Introducing version control for the document with
.
By default, the management of access rights is reserved for the managers of a workspace, but even this circumstance can of course be changed by modifying the access rights. One should use the change of access rights sparingly and discuss it within the workspace to avoid possible irritations ("Why is this action not possible here, which is allowed in every other workspace?").
In the following, we will explain the role concept in BSCW and show how to
•Finds out about the current distribution of roles and the associated access rights,
•Assigns roles,
•Roles changes and also
•new roles defined.
To conclude the section, we will go over the owner role, which governs which user is responsible for the space occupied by an object.