Flexible user levels, empowered users

Web Content Management System Flexible User Levels

Many organisations face the challenge of web publishing bottlenecks as a result of the responsibility of content updates being strictly limited to the IT department. Not only can this mean delays updating time sensitive information, but it always usurps the time of a highly skilled IT team. By devolving content publishing rights to the content owners, with safeguards and brand protocols in place, publishing efficiencies will be gained and the IT department will be free to tackle more strategic projects.

TERMINAFOUR Site Manager has a configurable and secure user rights and roles model, which allows users to update and manage content for the particular parts of the site or parts of a page they have been assigned to look after. Users can even be delegated a small part of a web page.

There are four basic levels of users (more tiers may be configured):

• Contributors are allowed to add, modify and delete content in those particular areas of the site(s) to which they have been assigned. However, everything authored by a contributor will need to be approved before it is released to the website. In practice, therefore, contributors simply prepare material for approval.
• Moderators are the next tier and have all the rights of a contributor. In addition they can sign-off or approve content on selected areas of the sites, based on the system's workflows. This user is the most configurable where the moderator could perhaps update one part of the site and be assigned to review content from another part of the site.
• Power Users have a limited set of Administrator functionalities, allowing them to completely control both the content and technical aspects of a specific channel, without having access to other channels. Power User is an ideal user level for large scale organisations, where multiple projects are being managed by different teams.
• Administrators have complete access to all functionality of the system across all sites and channels. In addition to the fucntionality available to Power Users, the administrator tier have a number of "Administrator/Super User only" capabilities such as access to the system's auditing and reporting area, content recyclying options and of course the ability to assign particular channels to the power user tier below.  

A key factor in the user acceptance of TERMINALFOUR Site Manager is that users have the reassurance that their publishing rights are managed so that they cannot operate beyond their capability/authorisation. TERMINALFOUR Site Manager enterprise web content management system functionality allows for full integration with directory services/LDAP/Active Directory/CAS/Shibboleth as it allows users to login using their normal computer password, or to use single sign-on functionality where available.

It is possible to approximately describe the hierarchical rights and roles structure in brief with the following sentence: contributors prepare the material and moderators edit it while power users own sites with administrators “owning” TERMINALFOUR Site Manager.