Creating custom collaborator roles for categories (IBM Knowledge Catalog)

If the predefined roles for category collaborators do not satisfy your business needs, you can create your own custom roles. Custom roles allow for more granular control over the actions that can be taken within a category. For example, you want a collaborator to edit terms within a category, but not create new terms or delete the existing ones. You can create a new role with the edit permission for business terms only.

For each role, you can define a custom set of permissions for managing artifacts and administering categories. The permission to view categories and artifacts is enabled by default for each new role and can't be disabled.

The custom category roles can be assigned to workflow configuration steps and notifications so that only users with the defined set of permissions are allowed to perform the workflow step.

Required permissions

To view custom category roles, you must have the Access governance artifacts and Manage workflows user permissions.

To create, edit, and delete custom category roles, you must have the Manage governance categories and Manage workflows user permissions.

The number of custom category roles that you can create is limited by your IBM Knowledge Catalog plan.

Creating custom roles

To create a custom category role, complete these steps:

Go to Governance > Categories.
Click Manage roles and then New category role.
Provide a meaningful name and optionally a description.
Select permissions. If a permission requires other permission to be selected, the required permission is selected automatically. For example, the Edit permission requires the View draft permission to be selected.
Review the details and permissions of your new role and click Create.

Assigning custom roles to users and categories

Assign the custom category roles to users and categories in the same way as the predefined roles. See Managing category collaborators.

A category must have at least one owner. An owner is a collaborator with the predefined Owner role, or a custom role that has the ownership permission. When users without the ownership permission create a category, they are assigned the predefined Owner role. If they want to remove this role from themselves, they can create a custom role with the ownership permission, and then remove the predefined Owner role.

To check where a role is used, open the details of the role and go to the Usage tab. You can see how many users and user groups that have this role assigned, and in which categories they are collaborators.

Deleting custom roles

Whether you can delete a customer role and the effects of deleting depend on the situation:

You can delete a role without any effect when a role is not assigned to collaborators or workflow configurations.
When a role is assigned to collaborators in categories, you can delete the role. The role is removed from the collaborators and from the list of roles in the categories.
You can't delete a role when it is assigned to a step or a notification in an active workflow configuration. Before you can delete the role, you must either deactivate the workflow configuration or remove the role from the step or notification.

Learn more

Parent topic: Categories