This article describes how to administer access rights to Change Management System projects. Rights must be administered for each project separately. You can assign rights to individual users one at a time or to a group of users using item access groups. Typically, only a few administrators will be given the capability to change user access rights in a project. 

Prerequisites

• You must have "Change" access rights to the CMS project OR the Administrator role in the server. 

Access rights are administered under the Project menu in the Users view. The view lists all users and item access groups that have access to the project and the type of access that they have. In the below example, there are 3 individual user members (those with a Real Name value) and one group member called "Testers". This group is an item access group. Although not indicated in this view, the 3 individual users may or may not be members of a project group.

The view lists all users in the project, including users whose accounts may have been deactivated, yet their membership in the project has not been removed. 

Access Rights

There are three possible access rights to projects. 

Read 

This is read-only access and it is the default access right for all project members. It means that the user can open the CMS project on the Projects tab. A member of a project always has at least Read access.

Write 

Enables the user to create new issues, modify existing issues that they themselves or other users have created, and delete issues that they themselves have created in the project. With Write access, you cannot delete issues created by other users. 

Change 

Enables the user to administer the project. They can modify anything in the project, including the access rights of any user, and also modify the setup of the project, e.g., Workflows, Issue Types, Attribute Types and Relationships. The user can also delete any issue, not just the ones that they created.

Adding Individual User Rights

Unless you are adding individual user rights via an item access group (see next section below), this is where you should always begin when adding access rights to a project. 

1. Click Add User.... The Select User(s) dialog will appear.
   
   
   
   

   Missing users in the Select User(s) dialog? Only users whose account is active can be added to a project group. If you are not finding a user in the pick list, you can check the Include inactive users box at the bottom of the dialog to see if they then appear in the list. If so, their account needs to be activated before you can add them to the group.

   
   
2. Select the user(s) to which you want to give access to the project and click OK. The user(s) will appear in the Users and Groups in Project with the initial default access right of "Read".
   
   

3. If the user needs Write or Change rights, right-click on their entry and select the rights that they need. The rights in effect are displayed in the Read, Write and Change columns.
   
   

Adding Access Rights via Item Access Group

If there already exists an item access group that includes all of the users that you want to add to a project and to whom you want to assign the same rights for, you can use that group to batch add those users to the project. The groups are maintained by Administrators outside the realm of CMS projects. For issue assignment, the users of the group will be listed individually in the validated user list when setting the Assigned To on an issue. You cannot select the group for assignment like you can with project groups.

1. Click Add Group... The Select groups dialog will appear.
2. Select the group that you want to add. The Users in group to the right will display all of the individual users who will receive access to the project via their membership in this group. 
3. Click OK.
   
   
4. The group will now appear on the Users tab.
   
   
5. Right-click on the entry if you wish to add Write and/or Change rights. All users in the group receive the same access rights. 

Things to Consider

If a user is added to the project via more than one item group and has not been added to the project as an individual user, the access rights of the item groups will be ANDed together. Any rights assigned to an individual user will override those gained from being a member of an item group.

Examples

A user who is a member of both "Group 1" and "Group 2" will have Write access to the project. 

If the user is then also added as an individual user, the individual user's rights will override the group rights. The user "Thorsten" in this example would have Read rights. 

What's Next?

Check out related articles in Change Management, such as How to Assign an Issue.