4.5 Owners and members

In the access details table of an object’s information page (see Figure 2.2-4), owners of the object are indicated by a * beside their user name. The primary difference between owners and members of a workspace or shared folder is that owners have the power to specify access rights for other members.

At least one person must be an owner of an object. The person which creates an object automatically owns it. Several members can own an object. For instance, this may be useful to permit access rights to be altered when the primary owner of an object is unavailable.

Owners and members are two of the three standard access rights groups defined by Business Collaborator. The three groups are:

• The owner of the object:
• Is initially the author (the user who creates or uploads an object), who is the one and only owner.
• In Business Collaborator, 'owner' is a group. Thus, the author may add other members of the workspace or shared folder to the owner group (and remove them again). At all times, the owner group must have at least one member. As long as this rule is not violated, the author can also remove himself/herself from the owner group, thus transferring ownership privileges to the other members in the owner group.
• Members of the workspace or shared folder that the object currently belongs to. If the object is transferred to another workspace or shared folder, the 'member' access rights are automatically assigned to the members of the new location.
• Other users who have been given access to specific objects but who have not been added as members.

Note

This distinction between owners and members is frequently used to simplify the assigning of access rights to an object. As owners and members are automatically differentiated by Business Collaborator, it requires minimal effort to give greater access rights to owners and lesser rights to members.