Managing access to a category

Required permissions

You must have a role with the Administer collaborators or Ownership permission in the category to manage category collaborators:

• Administer collaborators: Manage collaborators with any role except a role with Ownership permission. The default role that meets this criteria is the Admin role.
• Ownership: Manage collaborators with any role. The default role that meets this criteria is the Owner role.

The users that you add as category collaborators must have one of these user permissions:

• Access governance artifacts
• Manage governance categories
• Administer governance artifacts

You can add a user group as a collaborator. If the group is assigned one of the required permissions, all its users have the group's role in the category. Otherwise, only those users who have one of the required permissions have the group's role in the category. See Setting up IAM access groups. The predefined user group, Public access, includes all users who have one of the required user permissions for categories.

Restrictions

• Updates to category collaborators or roles might take up to 20 minutes to take effect.
• Category requires at least one collaborator with an Owner role. The Ownership of a category can only be changed by owners, or by a user with the Administer governance artifacts permission. Consider adding a group of users as owners of a category to avoid a situation when the only owner is removed.

Adding category collaborators

To add one or more collaborators to a category:

1. Go to the Access control page for the category.
2. Click Add collaborator.
3. Select the users to add as collaborators, or user groups.
4. Select the category roles for each user:
   • Owner: Manage the category, its artifacts, and its collaborators.
   • Admin: Manage the category, its artifacts, and its non-owner collaborators.
   • Editor: Default. View the category and manage its published and draft artifacts.
   • Reviewer: View the category and its published and draft artifacts.
   • Viewer: View the category and its published artifacts.
   • Custom role. A custom role has a custom set of permissions to control which actions collaborators can take within a category. See Creating custom category collaborator roles.
5. Click Add.

The collaborators are added with their assigned roles to the category and all its subcategories.

Adding more roles to collaborators

You can assign multiple roles to a collaborator who has multiple responsibilities in a category. For example, suppose you have a workflow for a category that requires permissions to create governance artifacts and review them. If you want the same collaborator to both create artifacts and review them, you must assign that collaborator either the predefined roles, the Editor role and the Reviewer role, or custom roles with the permissions to manage artifacts, and view drafts.

The more roles that you assign to each collaborator, the longer categories take to load. For best results, assign each collaborator the role with the most permissions that they need in the highest level category that they belong to.

To add one or more category roles to a collaborator:

1. Go to the Access control page for the category.
2. Click the pencil icon next to the collaborator name, select one or more roles, and click Save.

Changing collaborator roles

You can change the category role for individual collaborators or for the user groups.

You can change the role for a category collaborator only in the category where the collaborator is assigned that role. You can't change the role of a collaborator in a subcategory that inherited that collaborator and role from a higher-level category. To see in which category a collaborator is assigned a particular role, on the category's Access control page, click the Show inheritance icon.

Restrictions
A category must have at least one collaborator that is assigned a role with the ownership permission. If you are the only collaborator in a top-level category that has a role with the ownership permission, you cannot change your role. Consider adding a group of users as owners of a category.

To change the category role for a collaborator:

1. Go to the Access control page for the category.
2. Click the pencil icon next to the collaborator name, select one or more roles, and click Save.

The role applies to all subcategories of the category.

Deleting collaborators

You can remove collaborators from the category where they were added. You can’t remove collaborators from a category if they are inherited from higher-level categories.

To remove a collaborator from a category, click the trash icon next to the collaborator name. The collaborator is removed from the category and all its subcategories, except for any subcategories where the collaborator is assigned a different role.

For example, suppose you have this category structure: Main/Subcategory1/Subcategory2. The user Moe has the Viewer role in the Main category and the Editor role in Subcategory2. When you delete Moe from the Main category, he is also deleted from Subcategory1. However, Moe remains a collaborator in Subcategory2.

Learn more

• Category collaborator permissions
• Creating custom category collaborator roles
• Manage categories
• Managing workflows for governance artifacts

Parent topic: Categories