Jerry Waldorf's Blog

Roles, Entitlements, and User Attributes

What constitutes a users "role" in a particular application. Often it is a collection of many attributes about the user. For example, a user of a helpdesk application could have what would traditionally be thought of as a role of an administrator, end user, or agent. In addition the agent could have a "language" attribute that defines what languages that user speaks. If the user speaks French, English, and German. Then this attribute would reflect that. And the types of things that the user does in the application would change based on this attribute. For example, the user would be able to answer questions from customers that speak French. This attribute effects the behavior of the application just as much as the fact that the user is administrator or agent. Another example would be the timezone that a user is in would determine how calls are routed to that individual. This would be another attribute of the user that would effect the behavior of the application. In summary, many of the attributes of the user effect the applications behavior. Some can be easily classified as user roles. Others are a bit more fuzzy.

Posted at 09:56PM Jan 14, 2009 by Jerry Waldorf in Sun  |  Comments[5]