Roles & Permissions

Most users of Gibbon will fit into three main categories: staff, students, and parents. Gibbon uses roles, actions and permissions to control access to various parts of the system. Use the following options in the main menu under Admin > User Admin to set up users and access.

User Management - Access

1. Manage Roles - roles in Gibbon are groupings based on what a user can do within the system. Gibbon ships with the following default roles: Administrator (that's you), Parent, Student, Support Staff and Teacher. Add new roles according to the way you want to allow access to the system. For example, if you have some students with extended system privileges, create a new role called something like "Student Ext".
2. Manage Permissions - permissions turn individual module actions on or off for selected roles, allowing you to control who can do what to a relatively fine-grained level. Gibbon ships with sensible, common defaults, but it is worth auditing this area thoroughly to avoid nasty surprises in behaviour. For example, you probably would not want to give parents access to full student profiles, preferring instead to stick with brief profiles for parents, and full for staff.

User Management - Users

1. Manage Users - with your access rights ready, you can now start adding users, and the Manage Users area lets you do this by hand. There is also an Import from File option in System Admin which allows you to upload users in bulk using CSV-formatted spreadsheets. Later on, come back to Manage Users to reset passwords, assign new roles and much more. Note that users can be assigned multiple roles, and can use the Role Switcher on their homepage sidebar to access them. If you would like users to update their own information, this can be achieved under People > Data Updater.
2. Student Enrolment - students much be enrolled in the current school year if they are to appear in most areas of the system. On enrolment, students are placed into year and role groups. When the end of year arrives, use Rollover under the Admissions sub-menu to automate enrolment for the following year.
3. Manage Families - staff, students and parents can all exist within families, which act as the basic mechanism for granting parent users access to information on student users.
4. Manage Staff - all staff users should be registered as staff in order that they can be used in various areas of the system.

Admissions

1. Application Form Settings - if you are looking to reduce paper work and data entry, set up your Application Form parameters and make sure public applications are enabled. Your admissions officer (specified in System Settings above) will receive emails when new applications arrive, and can then manage these under Manage Applications.

User Permissions

Managing user permissions can be helpful when needing to hide certain modules from different roles.

If you find yourself needing to manage who can access what throughout your Gibbon system, you can do so by navigating to User Admin > Manage Permissions. From there, you can add, and remove permissions for the roles you have created in Gibbon. This will allow you to customize access to certain functions by role.