A BSCW access right permits a user to perform a cluster of actions on an object. As BSCW aims to support cooperative work, its basic idea is that an object is either

• private so that only the user who created it in a private folder may access it,

or

• shared, with particular access rights for the members of the shared folder (workspace) that contains the object. The access rights may vary for different members.

Access rights are assigned to members via the role which a member plays in a particular folder: when inviting a user to a folder via  File    Access    Invite Member   , it has to be specified in which role the new user shall become a member of the folder/workspace. The invited user then receives those access rights on the folder and the objects within the folder which are specified for the selected role.

Recommendation:

We recommend that groups using a shared workspace agree on a few basic rules for the organization of access rights, which are then set for the workspace as a whole and are automatically applied to all objects in that workspace. Only experienced users should plan and implement modifications of access rights.

Note:

A major motivation for limiting access rights is to prevent documents from being overwritten or deleted accidentally. BSCW offers two solutions which do not require modification of access rights:

• lock the document temporarily (see 3.4.4.2);
• establish version control for the document (see 4.8).