What is a Privilege?

The Security model for ITM centres on Roles, Users and Privileges. Privileges are important because they define the specific actions that a user can take on a specific piece of data.

Privileges are assigned to Security Roles, which have members.

The Administrator for your organisation can assign privileges to roles as they choose, and add the same privilege to as many roles as they want.

Conceptually, a privilege represents an ability to accomplish a specific task - or an amalgamation of other privileges. For example:

'Read Group Contacts' is a specific ability, allowing a user to read any contact details within their own Organisation Group (OG).
'Edit Group Contacts' covers that read ability, and also allows contacts to be added, modified, and deleted for the same OG - with some restrictions.
'Administer Group Contacts' covers the Edit privilege, but without restriction.
'Administer Organisation Contacts' is the same, but for everyone in the Org, not just the same Group.

By default users have essentially no access at all until privileges are assigned to them through roles. Note that a privilege cannot exclude other privileges. For example, if a user had the 'administer contacts' privilege for both the Org Group and Organisation levels, the user would have access to all contacts for their Organisation - not just for their Group.

When ITM tests a user's security, it looks at all the Roles the user is a member of, and checks if any of these have the privilege necessary to pass the test.

Because users may belong to a large number of roles, we have provided Administrators with the ability to see a list of all the privileges a given user has access to. This can be found on the Contact Details screen, just click 'Security' near the top right. Note that only users with the Administer Security privilege will see the link. This is a common feature in ITM - users will generally only see links and data that they have privileges for.

Related articles:
How do I get more privileges?
What is a Security Role?
The Organisation Administrator
What is a Contact, and what is a User?