User roles

Applies to Elementi M and Elementi X. For players, see the user access rights page.

Introduction

In large, collaborative environments such as: hotels, conference centers, museums, academical centers, stadiums, sport arenas etc., people have different responsibilities regarding digital signage content and a content manager might need to limit the access to some Elementi features to certain users. A typical example is that of a restaurant where:

• The content manager needs to have full control over the content editing and publishing;
• The chef only needs to edit the menu from time to time;
• The staff need to publish different menus on the screens according to the time of the day, without being able to change the menu content.

The answer to such challenges is the User roles feature, present in Elementi M and X, which allows assigning different authoring and publishing roles to users. There are three editing roles and three publishing roles, that can be freely combined, resulting in up to nine possible roles to use for different users within the same team / organization.

Editing roles

User Roles dialog

The following editing roles are available:

• Full control

  The user has access to all editing features of Elementi. This is the default setting.

• Edit mode

  The user has limited access to editing features.

• Read only

  The user is not allowed to modify any part of the content; only to preview it. The Edit panel is hidden and all the editing features of Preview panel are disabled.

Publishing roles

The following publishing roles are available:

• Full control

  The user has access to all the publishing feature of Elementi. This is the default setting.

• Limited

  The user can only publish to devices already associated with a certain project, without having the possibility to modify the publication list for that project.

• Not available

  The user cannot publish any content to any devices.

Limited editing

"User Properties" tab is showed in "Edit mode"

When the "Edit mode" role has been selected, Elementi only allows the user to modify those files and proprieties that were specifically marked as editable by the content creator.

• If an SVG file (layout, playlist, widget etc.) was marked as editable, it is listed within the Browse panel, along with the folders to get to it, but not the other files included into the project. To edit it, double-click on its icon in Browse panel to open it - the "User Properties" tab is showed in the Edit panel, listing all the properties that the user can change.
• The user cannot modify the position of the layer, nor any effects or layer formatting. The editing features are limited to:
  • text changes (content & formatting) - either directly in the Preview panel or by double-clicking on the text layer in the Edit panel (this opens the Edit Text dialog);
  • media changes - by dragging & dropping the media file (located in a folder named "media") from the Browse panel into the Preview panel or into the Edit panel.

Note:

All folders named "media" present inside the project are showed and fully available, so that the user can import and use other media files inside the project.

Setup

To set up a particular role for the current Elementi user, follow these steps:

1. Click the Menu button on the toolbar and select "Settings" > "User Roles..." option. This opens the "User Roles" dialog.
2. Select the editing role for the user from the dropdown field.
3. Select the publishing role for the user from the dropdown field.
4. Optionally, set a password to protect the user changing these roles afterwards.
5. Click the "OK" button to apply the changes.

Create template

Creating user properties

As explained above, a user having "Edit mode" role activated, can only modify those parts of the content (i.e. user properties) that were specifically marked by the content creator to be editable .

To create a template for users having the "Edit mode" role activated, follow these steps:

1. Click the Menu button on the toolbar and select "Settings".
2. Enable the "Edit User Properties" option.
3. Open the project that will be used by restricted users.
4. Open the SVG file (e.g., layout, playlist, widget etc.) which should be available to restricted users.
5. Within the Edit panel, a column named "Edit" is available in front of each layout layer, playlist slide, or widget property.
6. Click on the corresponding check-box to mark that layer / slide / property as editable by a restricted user.
7. Go to the "User Properties" tab and find a new entry for the selected item. This is what the restricted user would see.
8. Optionally, edit the auto-assigned name - for that, double-click over the name and enter a new one.
9. Repeat the process for the rest of SVG files which should be available to restricted users.
10. To allow the restricted user to import new files into the project, create one or more collections named "media" in the project.
11. Click the "Save" button to apply the changes.