Roles and Permissions
Roles decide what each person on your team can actually do. ContactDrive ships with two, and lets you build your own when those two are too blunt.
The built-in roles
- Admin — workspace-wide permissions. Everything, including Settings and billing.
- User — access to everything in the workspace except Settings.
These two are system roles. You can assign them freely, but you can't edit or delete them.
Custom roles
Two roles is enough for a small team and not enough for most others. Custom roles let you say "these people can see contacts and add activity, but can't delete anything or export."
- Go to Settings > Roles.
- Click the add button.
- Give the role a name and a description — the description is what your future self reads when wondering why this role exists, so write a real one.
- Choose the permissions it grants.
- Save.
The role is then available in the dropdown wherever you invite or edit a user.
Editing and removing roles
Use the actions menu on any custom role to edit or remove it. The two system roles have no such menu.
Before removing a role, move anyone who holds it onto a different one. A role with people still assigned to it is not a good thing to delete out from under them.
How permissions actually resolve
Worth understanding if you're granting access carefully:
A person's permissions are live. Change their role and their access changes immediately — there is no cache to wait on and no need for them to sign out and back in.
Apps are different. When an app is installed, it's granted a fixed set of permissions at that moment, and that grant doesn't widen on its own. When someone uses a feature an app provides, both have to allow it: the app must have the permission, and so must the person. An app can't let a User do something only an Admin may do, and a permission the app was never granted stays unavailable no matter who's clicking.