Access rights and roles
It is a basic principle in BSCW that an object is either
• private, so that only the creator has access to it in a private folder, or
• shared, so that the members of a shared workspace have access to it with specific access rights for the folder that contains the object. These access rights may vary from member to member.
BSCW access rights permit a user to perform certain actions on an object. Access rights are assigned to members via the role which a member plays in a particular folder. When you invite another user to a folder via , you specify the role for the new member in the folder. The access rights associated with this role are also valid for the objects within the folder.
Recommendation: We recommend that groups using a shared workspace agree on a few basic rules concerning the organization of access rights, which are then set for the workspace as a whole and are automatically applied to all objects in that workspace. Only experienced users should plan and implement modifications of access rights.
Note: A major motivation for limiting access rights is to prevent documents from being overwritten or deleted inadvertently. BSCW offers other ways to avoid this which do not involve the modification of access rights:
•
Lock the document temporarily
via 
.
• Freeze the document via
.
•
Establish version
control for the document via .
Information about current access rights
Defining and re-defining roles