Hidden on the right hand side of the Manage Groups area of your Control Panel is one of the most important features of digital workplace administration. The Manage Roles option lets you give various Groups superpowers, providing them access to additional functions above and beyond what they can receive through your Igloo's permissions model. Offer your leaders control over membership, appearance, and more. 

The primary purpose of roles is to let people do what they need to do in your digital workplace while keeping your number of Digital Workplace Administrators to a minimum. With roles, you can give team leads and department heads access to the administrative functions they need, without providing access to the full Control Panel, and without them needing to constantly submit requests to your own Administrators. So what are Roles good for? 

Communications

By default, members can Broadcast to Groups that they're a part of, but only Digital Workplace Administrators can Broadcast to everyone in your Igloo, or to any Group they like. For clients with internal communications teams, or who want to empower department heads to send messages to specific teams or projects you can set a Broadcast role, granting them access to that functionality. 

The Access Analytics and Google Analytics roles can grant your communications team access to vital data about how people are using your digital workplace. With those roles, they'll be able to reach all of the analytics options offered in your Igloo, to query and gather information about ongoing collaboration and knowledge management. 

Content

Content roles let people create and manage things that would normally only be the province of Administrators. Empower people to create their own Pages and Spaces, letting them spin up new projects and build new areas of your site. The Create Spaces role can be a huge asset to delegating social group management, as discussed last week. 

The Manage Labels role is often overlooked, but can be integral to your long term content management strategy. By default, only Administrators can create and manage labels, tags on content that add to searchability. Your digital workplace can have as many labels as you like, but members will have to pick between the labels set by the Administrators. With this role, we see people add their department heads to that list, letting them manage labels for their team, to ensure they have the categories they need, and not what the Administrators think they should have. As their team's needs change, they can adjust the labels directly rather than submitting requests to admins. 

Customization

If you want to delegate the management of your site's appearance and customization, perhaps to a team of designers or web developers, the Manage Theme, Edit JS, and Manage URL Shortcuts roles are what you'll need to assign them. These roles give people the freedom to create redirects, which allow for some very complex use cases, add javascript to any page in your digital workplace, and control the logo and theme in the Appearance area of the Control Panel. 

The purpose of roles is to let Administrators delegate functions, in order to improve security and accountability without sacrificing collaboration, or placing a heavy workload on your Digital Workplace Administrators. Through them, members have the power to build, change, learn, and work the way they need to, and roles open up new workflow opportunities for everyone in your Igloo. 

If you have other questions about roles, workflows, or best practices, you can leave a comment here, or ask a question in the Community area.