Admin Permissions Overview

Permissions Hierarchy

Access to functions and items (e.g. surveys and reports) in Checkbox is controlled two ways – first by the role that is assigned to the Contact or user and second by the Access List for each survey, report or other item. Below is a description of how each of these permissions controls works.

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Contact Roles

Contact roles are the first level of security in Checkbox. They are assigned to Checkbox contacts and dictate which areas and functions of Checkbox the contact has access to. You can select one or more contact role(s) for any given contact, depending on the level of access you wish to grant them within Checkbox.

In order for a contact to have access to a function in Checkbox, he or she must first have the proper contact role. For instance, let’s say that Survey Admin Mary wants to be able to grant her colleague Joe access to send out email invitations for her survey. In order for Joe to be able to send out a survey invitation, he must first be assigned a contact role of System Administrator or Survey Administrator. That’s because these are the only two contact roles that allow for access to survey invitations. If Joe was only a Survey Editor, our Survey Admin Mary would never be able to give access to Joe to send out her survey invitations, because his contact role doesn’t permit it.

With the exception of the System Admin (who is a super-user), a contact’s role alone does not give a contact access to all surveys, reports, folders, and contacts. By default, a contact has access only to what he or she has created. For example, if Mary and Joe are both Survey Admins, they will be able to create and manage their own surveys and reports because their contact roles allow them to do so. However, even though they have the same contact role, they can’t see each other’s surveys and reports unless they share access with each other . They would do this by editing the survey or report’s permissions and adding each other to the Access List – see below for details.

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Below is a summary of contact roles and the capabilities of each. For more specific information on contact roles:

• System Administrator: Super-user. Has access to all surveys, data, contacts, and system settings.
• Survey Administrator: Has the ability to create, edit, and manage new surveys and reports. Survey Administrators can also create and modify Styles.
• Survey Editor: Has the ability to edit existing surveys (when granted access by the survey’s creator or a System Administrator).
• Report Administrator: Has the ability to create and modify new reports for surveys he has been given access to.
• Report Viewer: Has the ability to view existing reports (when granted access by the report creator or a System Administrator).
• Contact Administrator: Has the ability to create and modify new contacts and Groups. Contact Administrators can only modify contacts they have created or have been given access to.
• Respondent: Has the ability to respond to surveys.

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Access Control Lists (ACL)

In Checkbox, the Permissions of a survey, report, folder, or Group are controlled by an Access Control List (ACL). If a Contact wants to share access to a survey, report, etc. with another admin, he would need to add that admin(or a Group that the Contact belongs to) to the Access List for his survey or report. The only exception would be for System Admins – they don’t ever need to be added to ACL’s since they have access to everything in the Checkbox account by default.

Note that in order for the permissions on the ACL to take effect, the Contact on the ACL must first have the appropriate role (see above).

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