impCentral Role Normalization

We’re in the process of re-thinking our collaboration roles. They were originally designed for our legacy UI and haven’t changed in the past three years. It’s clear they’re unsuited to impCentral – we’ve heard from some of you in re: how they aren’t matching your needs.

We’re looking for feedback on the following proposal. You’ll note that these changes – for the most part – make roles additive; many of our users simply grant all roles to collaborators, since the breakdown of permissions isn’t currently clear.

Current Roles

  • Administrator: View and update on general account metadata. Allows invitation and role changes on collaborators. Includes permissions from all other roles. Security-related permissions are not included (e.g., only an account owner can change their password).
  • Developer: Create / Read / Update / Delete on development zone and test zone groups and devices, including deployments.
  • Factory Operator: Originally meant to allow factory operators to blinkup factory devices; currently doesn’t actually allow that (i.e., yes, this role does nothing at the moment – it inverted security relationships, allowing grantors to access collaborator devices).
  • Operations Manager: Create / Read / Update / Delete on production groups and devices, including factory work. No code visibility.
  • Support: View production groups and devices, including factory work. Cannot create or deploy, but can move production devices between groups.

Proposed Changes

  • Administrator: Allows invitation and role changes on collaborators.
  • Production Ops: Create / Read / Update / Delete on production zone groups and devices, including deployments.
  • Developer: Create / Read / Update / Delete on development zone and test zone groups and devices, including deployments.
  • Support: View production groups and devices, including factory work. Cannot create or deploy, but can move production devices between groups. No code visibility.
  • Blinkup Device: Grant collaborators the right to blink up devices into your account (this effectlvely replaces the Factory Operator role).

We’d like to keep the roles simple and understandable, and hope that these match the bulk of your use cases.

PLEASE NOTE: Blinkup Device will be replacing Factory Operator in our next release:

  • the role will be available in the collaboration views.
  • no collaborators will automatically receive the role.
  • all collaborators who only have the Factory Operator role will be removed.
  • the impCentral UI will provide javascript blinkup into accounts for which you have the Blinkup Device role.
  • mobile apps don’t currently support this.

Might be worth putting these descriptions on the page where you add/edit roles of a user.

Agreed, we’ll be adding descriptions for all roles in the future.