Managing Users
Before you can start using oliwork effectively in your organization or company you have to set up the roles, relations and users to adapt the application to the structure of your organization. For this oliwork offers a comprehensive system to manage the access rights of each user. In addition to that the relation system allows you to easily view the time reports and time accounts of your employees.
Setting up roles
Each user will be assigned to a role. The role determines the access rights of the users assigned to the role. There are three possible access levels: Write, Read and None. Every role has an access level defined for each feature.
Write gives all users with the role full access to the feature and all of it’s sub-pages. If a user gets write access to the userlist, he or she can see all users, roles and relations and create new entries or delete them.
Read allows all users with the role to view the site and it’s content. If a user receives read access to the userlist, he or she can see all users, roles and relations but can neither create new ones, nor delete them.
None prevents the users of the role from accessing or viewing the site. If a user receives none-access to the userlist, he or she can neither view, nor manipulate the users, roles and relations. The user also won’t be able to see the menu entry for the userlist.
You should put some thought into setting up the access levels correctly and familiarize yourself with the software to determine which role should have which access rights. In most cases it is for example not recommended for every employee to have write-access to the userlist since anyone could then simply delete user accounts which would lead to a total loss of data for the deleted users. To prevent this kind of data loss it also generally recommended to do regular backups which can be done in the “Settings”-section.
Setting up relations
Relations allow the users of one role to access the data of all users of another role. This is useful if an employer needs to check the work or vacation time of his employees, an admin needs to setup a new user account and in many other cases. A relation consists of a “Role that views or edits” and a “Viewed or edited role”. The former would be the employer or admin and the latter the employee in the previous example. In addition to defining the roles involved in the relation the rights of the accessing role to the data of the accessed role needs to be defined. The access levels are identical to the ones defined in the previous section: Write, Read and None. Be aware that if you create a relation between two roles with write-permissions the users of the accessing role could modify and manipulate the data of any user with the accessed role.
Setting up users
After creating roles and, if required, defining relations between them, you can create the individual user accounts. Generally you need one user account per employee whose work time will be recorded using oliwork.
When creating a user you have to define the username, password and role for the account. In addition there is an optional email value. You can freely edit the data of the users at any time, including the password. If you decide to delete a user be aware that all data associated to the user, including previously recorded work time, will be permanently deleted.
Once a user is created your employee can immediately log in to his or her account. In many cases it however makes sense to set up their workplan and hourplan to ensure that holidays, vacation and sick time is properly taken into account and the current value for the time account is correct. To achieve this you can use the relation system described in the previous section.