Security Roles Overview

Access to this product feature is dependent on your institution's Watermark agreement
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User access within Faculty Success is controlled by Security Roles. Each role has a set scope - unrestricted, unit, individual, or self - and a set list of permissions. These settings work together to give a user assigned to the role access to specific utilities and users. 

This article outlines the various ways security role scopes and permissions can be combined to provide your users with the access they require when reviewing and creating security roles for your Faculty Success instance, as well as how to assign a security role to a user account.

See this article for suggestions on additional security roles that are commonly added.

Security Role Scopes

For a University instrument, the default scopes available for security roles are:

• Unrestricted: all users within Faculty Success
• College: all users within a selected college
• Department: all users within a selected department
• Individual: all selected individuals
• Self: a faculty member's ability to access their own data

For unit level instruments, the Unrestricted role remains in place to give access to all users within Faculty Success. The unit level scopes are revised to reflect the instrument, however, so a College scope may not be available in all instruments.

If additional ways to group users are needed, scopes can be added via Screen Revision Work Request. We sometimes see this if a School or Division field is added to Yearly Data. Whether new fields are made available as scopes for security roles depends on whether you request to be able to use the field as a security role scope or not. If this is needed for a specific new field, please make sure to note this in your work request. This will also require that the field have a defined list of options. That is, it must be a drop-down-list or check-box-list.

Security Role Permissions

All Faculty Success permissions align with available utilities within the system. Available permissions, along with a brief description of each are outlined below:

• Home: Access resources and technical information, and track key aspects of the solution.
• Manage Data: Read/Write: Enter or manage other users' teaching, research, and service activities, including hidden and read-only fields
• Manage Data: Proxy: Enter or manage other users' teaching, research, and service activities, excluding hidden and read-only fields
• Manage Data: Read only: Review a read-only version of the data collection screens (including hidden fields) with users' teaching, research and service activities
• Manage Administrative Data: Easily copy the Yearly Data records from one year to the next for users for whom you have permission, or update these users' Yearly Data records from a central location.
• CV Imports: Access the CV Imports tool for yourself, or for faculty whose data you manage. Upload a current Vita and drag-and-drop details of your activities into the relevant screens and fields.
• Self-Service Reports: Export Data: Query the data in the solution using the parameters you identify. This permission can also be toggled to either include the ability to include hidden fields in report output or exclude this access for a given security role.
• Self-Service Reports: Formatted: Create document-style reports, such as a CV or Annual Report, with real-time preview as you make changes to the formatting and data included. Share these reports with other security roles or users as needed. These reports also enable users to add and edit records directly from the report, streamlining the data entry and verification process.
• FS Insights: This permission grants a user access to the Faculty Insights feature. The FS Insights permission is only available to an unrestricted security scope, which allows users who have been granted this permission to view the summary reports for all users.
• Full-Service Reports: Run reports based on templates created by Watermark. Report templates can be restricted to specific units - college or department - if they should only appear to users assigned to specific units or only include faculty assigned to specific units.
• Usage Statistics: View statistics on the use of Faculty Success by your users. These include the number of logins and number of records added or edited. This permission can also be toggled to either include the ability to retrieve audit logs for individual faculty or exclude this ability for a given security role.
• Users and Security: Create new users, edit, enable/disable or delete existing user accounts. View security role details and associated users. Also includes the ability for the University Administrator to see a comprehensive list of custom reports and the security roles to which they are available.
• Work Requests: Ability to submit work requests to change your Faculty Success instance and access both open and completed requests. This permission can be granted to one campus account and one college account, and it is also granted by default to the University Administrator and College Administrator security roles. This permission also includes the user in Faculty Success emails for new enhancements and updates. See this article for information on how to grant this permission to multiple accounts.
• Help Center: Use our self-service knowledge center, contact Support, and review release notes
• Change Your Password: Change the password for your user account. Granted to all default security roles. Only visible for a user if they authenticate using Local Authentication.

 Assigning Security Roles to User Accounts

When a user account is created in bulk or manually, security roles are assigned for the first time. If a user needs to be assigned a new security role, we recommend reading this article on how to manage an existing user account.