As mentioned above, an ATG environment can include two types of role—global and organizational. This section describes the roles and explains the differences between them.
Global Roles
Global roles represent any type of generic or specific function or activity that you choose, for example “admin,” “sales rep,” or “webmaster.” You can do the following with a global role:
Assign it to any organization as an auto-applied role. Users then inherit the properties of that role as additions to their own profiles.
Group similar global roles together into folders to help you manage them more easily.
Organizational Roles
Organizational roles are specific to a particular organization. You can do the following with an organizational role:
Assign it as an auto-applied role to the organization under which you created it. (Note that you cannot assign an organizational role that you created for Company Y to Company Z.) The role is then automatically assigned to all users who belong to that organization.
Assign it to any individual user who is a member of the organization to which the role belongs. In this case, other members of the organization do not automatically inherit the role’s properties.
Organizational roles contain a property called function that you can use as a way of identifying similar roles in different organizations. Suppose you have a business-to-business commerce site. The companies with whom you do business are defined as organizations in the Business Control Center—you create an organization called Company A and another called Company B. Each company has buyers who are responsible for buying products from your site. You decide that you want to offer different prices to each buyer depending on his or her organization; for example, you want buyers from Company A to have a 15% discount on any backordered item, but you do not want to offer this discount to buyers from Company B.
You set up two organizational roles, Buyer A and Buyer B, and assign one to each organization. You can then design your pricing structures and scenarios to differentiate between the two, offering distinct discounts to each role. However, in other ways the two roles are very similar, and you decide you want to establish a connection between them. You specify “buyer” as the Function property for each role—this property acts as a sort of keyword and allows the ATG system to keep track of the fact that the roles are related. You could then write custom applications that use this property in a variety of ways; for example, they could create custom scenario events that are triggered by members of any organizational role with a given function value. (See the ATG Personalization Guide for Business Users for information on creating scenarios.)
The following images show the profiles you set up for the two organizational roles. Note that the setting of the Function field is the same for each one.
Note: The value of the function property must be unique within an organization. For example, you cannot create two organizational roles for the same organization and give them both the function “supervisor.”
