Knowing we’re going to be growing our team soon, we decided to re-think the way permissions work for Simplifya Admins. Up until now, all Admin users had access to all modules and that’s probably on every security top 10 list of things not to do!
The best practice is to give users access to only the modules needed for their role, which serves two purposes. The first is helping to protecting our data and avoiding harmful changes from happening to client accounts (or our app in general) on accident. The second is lessening the burden on new Simplifya employees learning to navigate the Admin portion of the app.
How do the new permissions work?
We started by breaking the different job roles within Simplifya, including ones we figure to have at our peak size. When it was all said and done, we agreed on the following six roles (with brief descriptions):
- Client (account settings/creation, pricing/payments, and things necessary for troubleshooting)
- Support (anything necessary for client troubleshooting)
- Content (modules controlling our regulatory content)
- Sales (modules for viewing converted user activity)
- Finance (anything related to company payments)
- Marketing (modules with the ability to view, but not control, accounts or content)
We crossed these roles with the different modules in the nav bar to determine which module pertains to each role. Simply put, each role (eg “Sales”) has a set of modules attached it (eg, “User Manager” and “Audits”). So if a user is given a role, they’ll be able to see the modules it’s attached to.
When do these changes take effect?
These changes will take effect in the next week, so if you notice a difference in the modules available to you on the left-hand menu when you log in, this is why.