News & Updates

New Customisable User Permissions

By Paolo Dona — Feb 07, 2012

NiftySchool allows different members of staff to log in and complete tasks related to their specific duties.

For example, teachers can only see their own timetable and classes, while receptionists can see student details, take payments, and manage enrollments.

In order to decide which actions could be performed, and which ones couldn’t, NiftySchool used to rely primarily on the user role, such as ‘teacher’, ‘receptionist’, ‘manager’, etc.

This was a simple way to manage permissions that worked most of the time, but limited you when setting up users with mixed responsibilities.

Today we’re releasing a new permission engine that will allow you to decide exactly what each one of your users can or cannot do in the system.

Under the user’s details, you will now find a “manually edit permissions” link:

Click on the link, and a new section will appear, with a set of actions that you can check/uncheck, based on what you want the user to be able to do:

Click ‘Save and Confirm’, and the specific permissions set for the user will override the defaults inferred by their roles.

For example, a receptionist can by default access the reports section, but you can restrict this behaviour by unticking the “Can access reports” checkbox, by the “Reports” label.

If you want to reset the permissions to the default values for a role, just unselect them all, and select the checkbox by the role you want to assign (eg: click ‘remove all’ and then re-tick ‘teacher’).

In the next few weeks we will tweak the list of actions available to accommodate customer requests and to fine tune the default behaviour of the available roles.

Should you need specific actions in the system to be configurable, please let us know sending and email to info@niftyschool.com.