Ownership and ownership role

The owner role is a system role, i.e. it is calculated by BSCW and not set arbitrarily by the user. Each object has one or more owners who share the responsibility for the disk space occupied by the object they own - important if disk space monitoring ('quota system') is enabled for your BSCW server.

Ownership and the transfer of ownership (as well as the transfer of roles in general) is best understood by taking a closer look at the entries in folder overviews that act as references to the BSCW objects themselves. An object is accessed using the entries, and an object may have multiple entries. Example: If you click on the entry of an HTML document in one of your shared workspaces, the document is displayed to you. When another member of the same workspace clicks her entry of the same HTML document, she also sees the document. You both have (at least) read-only access to the HTML document because of your entries in the shared workspace, which both point to the same object.

When you cut, remove or paste an object, you do not actually cut or remove or paste an object, but you move an entry that refers to the object to your clipboard, your trash or from your clipboard to a folder. Moving objects in BSCW means moving entries, not the objects themselves.

How are entries created? When you create an object, entries for that object are created for all members of the folder in which you create the object. Other actions also create additional entries for an object, e.g.  Link in other path creates an entry that refers to the object, and inviting new members to a workspace creates entries for the workspace and its contents in the personal workspace ('home folder') of the newly invited members.

There are two varieties of entries that differ in terms of ownership, membership, and role transfer:

o  Entry transfers roles: This is typically the case when an object is created along with its entries in a folder. In this case, the object inherits all members and their roles, including the owner role, from the folder in which the object was created.

o  entry sets roles: This is typically the case when a user A is invited to a folder in the role 'xyz'. This is because an entry is then created in the personal workspace ('home folder') of user A that points to the folder and sets the role 'xyz' for user A. The owners of the folder remain unchanged, only user A comes in the role 'xyz'. The owners of the folder remain unchanged, only user A in the role 'xyz' is added.

If you have the necessary access rights - by default the rights of a manager, you can often change the property of entries to assign roles or set roles. Calling the Assign Role action in the Members menu  entry per object that transfers the owner role from a parent folder, since the owner role cannot be set by the user. The specific role assignments for the listed users override the role assignments resulting from role transferring and role setting (see 5.2.3 Assign roles).

Unfortunately, the two kinds of entries cannot be easily distinguished in a folder overview. The icon , where owner and parent folder owner are different, are good candidates for role-setting entries, whereas entries without are  good candidates for role-transferring entries. To be sure, however, you must invoke  the Assign Role action in the Members menu.

When entries are moved (cut, pasted, removed), they do not change their ability to transfer or set roles. If you move a role-setting entry to your clipboard, it will remain role-setting and you will keep your role(s) that you had before as well.

The members and their roles in relation to an object result as the sum of what is transferred or set by the individual entries that refer to the object. If necessary, this can still  be overridden by specific role assignments in the Members menu with Assign Role. When no more entries refer to an object, i.e. when all entries have been deleted, the object will also be removed from the system at the next opportunity (see 'Delete' below).

Having presented the general principles, we now turn to the question of how cutting, pasting, removing, and deleting entries that refer to an object affect the ownership and membership of that object.

•      Cut: Cutting an entry from a folder F moves the entry to your clipboard. If the entry transfers roles, it now transfers roles and members from your clipboard instead of from folder F. This gives you the role of owner and manager. When the entry sets roles, your role remains unchanged. Any other members of F will lose access to the object referenced by the entry via that entry. Membership and ownership derived from other entries that reference the same object remains unchanged.

•      Paste: Pasting a role-transferring entry from your clipboard to a folder G now makes that entry transfer the members and roles of folder G instead of from your clipboard. Consequently, all members, managers, and owners of G also become members, managers, and owners of the object referenced by the entry. You lose your role as owner/manager if you are not also owner/manager of G. Pasting a role-setting entry from your clipboard into a G folder leaves you in the role you already had on the clipboard. Any other members of G will have access to the object referenced by the entry in the role of the role-setting entry - overridden, if necessary, by the object's specific role assignments - with the exception of restricted and anonymous members of G who become anonymous members of the object to ensure at least minimal access to the object. Ownership of the object, which is after all based on other role-transferring entries, remains unchanged.

•      Remove: works like cut; the entries are just moved to your trash instead of your clipboard.

•      Put back: works like insert; the entries are only moved to their original location.

•      Delete: removes entries from your trash. When you delete a role-setting entry, you lose access to the object referenced by the entry through that entry; if the entry was your only access to the object, you are no longer listed as a member of the object. If you delete a role-transferring entry - you own and manage the object in this case because you own and manage your recycle bin - you lose the owner and manager roles to the extent they were transferred via that entry. If the entry was your only access to the object, you will no longer be listed as the owner and member of the object. The disk space used by the object is no longer attributed to your disk space usage if disk space monitoring is enabled for your BSCW server. If the role-transferring entry to be deleted is the last role-transferring entry that refers to an object and there are other role-transferring entries that refer to the same object, we have a problem. If the role-transferring entry were simply deleted, the object would no longer have an owner; moreover, you would think you had deleted the object that belongs to you, while other members still have access to it. To avoid such a situation, the other role-conferring entries are also deleted. Because this causes the other members to lose their access to the object, BSCW will warn you before you delete the last role-setting entry that refers to an object that still has other members. If you proceed, the object will have no more entries and will be removed from the system at the next opportunity.