Creating Custom Roles in Guru

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Access Required

Only Admins (or a relevant custom role) can create and manage Custom Roles.

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Best Practices

• Assign roles explicitly to ensure permissions are effective. Check out the scoping exercise below.
• Use role toggles carefully, especially for sensitive permissions like deleting content or managing billing.
• Test roles in smaller batches before rolling them out widely.

Watch the video tutorial: Assigning access in Guru

Understanding Custom Roles

Unlike System Roles, Custom Roles can be tailored to meet your team's specific permissioning needs. Custom Roles define permission profiles but do not grant access on their own. Permissions become active only when assigned to specific objects such as Workspaces, Collections, Knowledge Agents, Sources, or Pages.

Understanding System Roles

While Custom Roles can be set to meet your team's specific permissioning needs, there are three System Roles that are unchangeable in Guru: Admins, Creators, and Owners.

1. Admin is a Workspace-level rolein Guru. Admins can manage the overall platform configuration, permissions, content, users, and integrations.
2. Owner is a workspace-level role in Guru. Admins can delegate elevated access to specific objects to Owners—like Collections, Pages, Sources, and Knowledge Agents—without granting full Admin rights.

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Important

Users with the Owner role have no access to any other objects unless explicitly granted.

Owners only gain permissions for the specific object(s) where they are designated as an Owner.

3. Creator is a Workspace-level role in Guru. Creators can create new objects, but cannot manage objects they didn't create. When a Creator creates one of these objects, they automatically become the Owner of that object. Users with the Creator role can create the following:
   1. Knowledge Agents
   2. Collections (Including Cards and folders within Collections they created)
   3. Pages
   4. Sources

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Important

Users with the Creator role can only create the supported object types listed above. They do not have any elevated permissions beyond object creation.

However, because they become the Owner of any object they create, they will gain:

• Edit
• Share
• Delete

permissions for that object.

Creating and Editing Custom Roles

1. Go to the Manage menu.
2. Select Custom Roles to see all system and custom roles, along with available permissions.
3. Click Create New custom role to create a new one from scratch.
   1. Alternately, you can choose to duplicate an existing role's permissions by clicking the three stacked dots next to an existing role and select Duplicate.
4. Name the role.
5. Click Create.
6. Use the permission checkboxes within the table to assign relevant actions for each object.
7. Next, don't forget to navigate to the specific object settings (Workspaces, Collections, Knowledge Agents, Sources, or Pages.

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Best Practices

For guidance on how to create an Author or Expert role, see: Best Practices: Creating Author and Expert Roles with Custom Roles.

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Note

If a custom role involves a workspace-level permission, the Group/User must also be set in workspace permissions.

Assigning Roles to Objects

• Custom roles must be assigned to individual objects (e.g., Workspaces, Collections, Knowledge Agents, Sources, or Pages).
• Creating an object (like a Page) automatically assigns the Owner role to the creator.
• Custom roles cannot be set as default roles for newly created objects.
• For guidance on how to assign a role to an object, see: Permissioning Knowledge in Guru

Frequently asked questions about Custom Roles

What happened to Author and Expert roles?

Teams that were created before the Custom Roles feature was rolled out had access to Author and Expert roles. Those roles still exist, though they have been transitioned to Custom Roles and can be managed and customized to your needs under manage > Custom Roles. See also: Understanding the new updates to Roles and Permissions

What do the different custom analytics permissions grant access to?

• Workspace Analytics Permission: Unlocks all dashboards and all content within those dashboards. This permission also unlocks an extra tile "Card Usage by User" in Card analytics.
• View User Analytics Permission: Unlocks the Group and User Drill Down dashboard. Data in the dashboard will be populated from the Collections the user has access to.
• View Author Analytics Permission: Unlocks the following dashboards:
  • Adoption
  • Feature Usage
  • Group Impact
  • Verification health
  • Knowledge Health
  • Contribution
  • Announcements
  • Data in the dashboards will be populated from the collections the user has been added via role(s) with this permission.
• View Agent Analytics Permission: Unlocks the Answers dashboard

What is the best way to scope out a new role?

Use the following exercise to scope out a new custom role.