Workiva Support Center

In Workiva, your ability to access and interact with a feature is set according to your role. Roles allow companies to scope an employee's access to only the tools necessary for their job. Once a role is assigned, access can be further restricted through the use of permissions -- such as the ability to view or edit a particular file.

Chains works much the same, but with one important difference: permissions can be applied to a single chain, an environment, or an entire workspace. 

Understanding roles

Chains has three unique roles that can be assigned through the Members section of the Workspace settings screen:

• Chain Owner: This legacy role grants full access to all Chains settings and objects; it's equivalent to the Workspace Owner role and supersedes all permissions. It can change workspace settings, variables, environments, and connections within the workspace. We recommend only trusted, top-level administrators be assigned this role.

  Note: Workspace owners have the same abilities as the Chain Owner role.

• Chain Builder: The Chain Builder role allows access to the Chains homepage, but nothing else — each team member's abilities are entirely dictated by the permissions they've been assigned. We recommend this role for most team members.

  Note: Content managers have the same abilities as the Chain Builder role.

• Chain Security Admin: This role assigns permissions to other users and can designate them as Environment Security Admins. This role can be assigned to a specific environment, a workplace, or the entire organization.

Additionally, there are two unique roles that can be assigned at the org level:

• Org Security Admin: This role can enable and disable connectors for the org.
• Org Chain Security Admin: This role manages connections and runners across workspaces, and can view the Chains security audit log.
   

Access granted by each role

Understanding permissions

Once roles are assigned, a Chain Security Admin can assign permissions to each user group in the workspace. For most team members, permissions will work hand in hand with the Chain Builder role: Chain Builder grants access to the Chains homepage, and permissions dictate what they can do once there.

In all, there are five permission levels assignable from Chains:

• Viewer: Permission to view chains, but not run, edit, or delete chains.
• Executor: Permission to view and run chains, but not edit or delete chains.
• Editor: Permission to view, run, and edit chains, but not create new chains, or delete existing chains. 
• Creator: Permission to view, run, edit, delete, and create chains.
• Admin: Full admin access to chains in the Workspace.

Note: Viewer and Admin permissions cannot be manually assigned at the workspace level. Viewer permission is a default permission given to all members of the workspace, and Admin permission is granted by the user's role.

Access granted by each permission