A BSCW access right permits a user to perform a cluster of actions on an object. As BSCW aims to support cooperative work, its basic idea is that an object is either

• private, so that only the user who created it in a private folder may access it,

or

• shared, with particular access rights for the members of the shared folder (workspace) that contains the object. The access rights may vary for different members.

Access rights are assigned to members via the role which a a member has in a particular folder: When inviting a user to a folder via  File    Share    Invite Member   , it has to be specified in which role the new user shall become a member of the folder / workspace. The invited user then receives those access rights on the folder and the objects within the folder which are specified for the selected role.

When a user creates, e.g., a folder, he or she receives the role "Manager" of this folder and thereby the access rights associated with the role "Manager". (In general, a Manager has full control of the object.)

Several roles are already predefined on each BSCW system. Usually the following roles are available: "Owner", "Manager", "Member", "Registered user", and "Restricted member" (but a BSCW system administrator may add further predefined roles).

Recommendation:

We recommend that groups using a shared workspace should agree on a few basic rules for 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:

One major motivation for limiting access rights is to prevent documents from being overwritten or deleted accidentally. Here BSCW offers two solutions which do not require modification of access rights:

• lock the document temporarily (see section 4.6.3);
• establish version control for the document (see section 4.8 for details).