### Assignment of roles

Role assignments may be done in two different ways:

• when inviting users to the member group of a workspace or other container object;

• by explicitly using Access Assign Role .

##### Role assignment during invitation

When inviting users to a workspace, the roles which may be assigned are indicated by the selection list of the field ‘Invite new members as’ in the ‘Invite Member’ form. This includes normal roles like Manager or Member, and restricted roles like Restricted member, but not system defined roles like, e.g., Owner or Creator. Workspace managers may invite users in all roles valid for a particular workspace, simple members, however, may do so only in roles on the same ‘level’ or below, e.g. as members or restricted members, but not as managers.

Since not only single users, but also whole member groups may be invited to a workspace, it is possible to assign a role to a group when inviting this group. The role is assigned to every member of the group. This may lead to multiple roles for a user, e.g., when you invite two groups of users in different roles, which both contain the same user.

##### Role assignment using ‘Assign Role’

Using the action Access Assign Role , you may grant (or deny) particular access rights to specific members of an object by re-assigning the roles assigned during invitation or inherited from parent workspaces.

The ‘Assign Role’ form presents you with a list of all members along with their roles. By clicking the respective control boxes, you may change the role assignments (or leave them as is). Assignments of system-defined roles like Owner or Creator may not be changed here. By clicking [Reset Role Assignments], you may reset all individual role assignments done for this particular workspace (if any).

By default, the Assign Role action is reserved for the managers of a workspace.

If the object, for which the role assignment is done, is contained in more than one folder you are first presented with a different form, where you may choose for each containing folder whether to inherit all role assignments from this folder (including ownership) or to assign a specific role to all members of this folder. The latter may again lead to multiple roles for a specific user. Click [Add Specific Role Assignments] to proceed to the form for individual role assignment for the different members.

Note: You may use the Access Assign Role action for sharing or transferring ownership of a given object, if this object is contained in more than one folder. Choose to inherit role assignments and ownership from a containing folder to have the owners of the containing folders also become owners of the object. You may give up workspace ownership altogether by switching off the role inheritance from the specific containing folder where you are an owner (and hence have become the owner of the object under consideration).

Ownership becomes important when disk space control has been activated for your BSCW server, because all objects that you own are added to your disk space quota, and this may eventually lead to a violation of your disk space limit. Shared ownership of resources that use up much disk space might be a fair solution because disk space usage is also shared between the owners.