Roles, permissions and assignment

This page explains who can do what in Bernard (roles and permissions), how people are organised by department, and how work is assigned to them. Creating a user account is described in User management.

Roles and permissions

A role is a job label (artist, lead, supervisor, production, IT…) that the studio defines itself. Each user has a role; each task has an expected role (Assign To). The role decides what the user can create, delete, edit and see.

Creating and customising a role

Reserved for administrators and for roles that have the Can access the Global Root Settings permission.

Go to the studio root (Navigate › Go To Root), then open the Tree View.
Go to Categories › Custom Categories, the roles category. Right-click › Create to add a role.
In the Properties panel, set its name, its colour and its background colour.

Creating a role also creates its Role Setting (the set of its permissions); deleting the role deletes it.

Setting a role's permissions

Reserved for administrators. Open Bernard › Settings › Roles Setting. Choose the role: three panels are displayed, Content edition rights, Content display rights and Role-based behaviours. Each permission is a box, or a list for the create and delete permissions. The full list, with default values, is in Roles Setting. The permissions that most often affect workflows and assignment:

Permission	What it allows	Default
Can Create / Can Delete (per object type: Item, Category, Resource, Project, Project Item, Folder, Group, Playlist, File, Property, Action, Note, Instruction)	create or delete each object type	none
Can manually abort tasks	set a task to Aborted	yes
Can modify the state of tasks assigned to others (override assignees)	change the state of a task you are not assigned to	yes
Can modify active Workflow structures (Add/Remove tasks)	edit the workflow of an item in production	no
Can propagate property values to all child references	Set this value on all references	no
Can toggle properties between 'Global' and 'Local' inheritance	Set Mode to Local / Global	no
Can assign actions / Can remove assigned actions	assign actions to objects	no
Can edit event triggers	create triggers	no
Has access to projects settings	open the Project Settings	no
Can access the Global Root Settings	open the Root Settings	no

Create permissions are deliberately closed by default: an artist generally has no need to create a project. Give Project as Can Create to production roles, for example.

Reserved for administrators, whatever the role: Login as, the Tech tab, Global Settings, Administration Tools and changing a user's role.

Permissions per property

On top of the role's permissions, each property has two lists, Read Access and Write Access (of roles and users):

empty list: everyone can read, or write;
filled list: only the listed roles and users can read, or write;
an administrator can always write; a read-only property cannot be written by anyone.

For example, reserve writing the Bid (budget) to production and reading it to leads and supervisors. To set them, select the property of the model (see Customising Bernard) and fill in its two lists. In the spreadsheet, a column you cannot edit carries a padlock.

Departments

A department (Department) groups disciplines: modelling, animation, compositing… It has a name, a colour, a background colour and an icon. Departments are kept in the locked Departments folder.

Creating a department (administrators):

Go to the studio root, open the Tree View and the Departments folder.
Right-click › Create › Department, type the name, click Create.
In the Properties panel, choose the text colour, the background colour and the icon (drag and drop an image). The History tab keeps a trace of these changes.

Where they are used

A user belongs to one or more departments: Departments property of their record (type the first letters to find it). You set it in the users view or in the Properties panel.
A task and a compound have one department (Department property).
Departments are also used to organise actions in menus, to colour the nodes of the Node View (Department: button) and to group the columns of Spreadsheet Multi.

Once created, a department is available everywhere in Bernard.

Assigning work

The principle: you assign department × role pairs, not tasks one by one.

Each task of the workflow has a department and an expected role (Assign To), set on the model.
The Assignment tab of an item (a shot, an asset) gathers all the department × role pairs of its tasks.
You put people in each pair: all the tasks of the item that have this pair are assigned to them.
A pair where nobody was put is automatic: if there is only one project user (Project Users) with this role and this department, they are assigned; if there are several, nobody is.
Assignment can also be forced task by task.

For automatic assignment to find someone, the person must therefore have the right role, the right department and be among the project's users. See Assignment for the buttons of the tab (Update Automatic Assignment, Reset Automatic Assignment).

Who can assign? In the Assignment tab, those who have the permission to write the Assignment property of the item. In the spreadsheet, the Assignment column is computed from the subtasks and is read-only.

Assign Me

If you write a note or a correction on a task and you want to take it:

tick Assign me to this task (or Assign me to these N tasks) in the note window, or right-click on the tasks › Assign Me;
Bernard places you in the task's department × role pair, in place of those who were there: all the tasks of the item that have this pair become yours, and the item's files are downloaded to your workstation.
The state of the task does not change.

Assign Me is only offered if the task has a department and a single expected role.

Only one task in WIP per person

When you set a task to WIP, Bernard puts your previous task in progress to Pause. This way the time spent is only counted on one task at a time. The detail of the states is in Workflows, states and templates.