What does each author need access to?

In this lesson we’ll consider what an author (either an item or a test author) needs to be able to do, and relate that to which areas of which TAO libraries they will each need access to in order to carry out their tasks.

Ian and Iris, for example, will spend a large part of their day developing new test items in their scratch folders. They want to be sure that, when they leave at the end of the day, the items they’ve been working on will be there the next day, in the form in which they left them, so that they may continue their work. Iris doesn't mind Ian looking at the items she's working on, but she doesn't want him to do anything in her folder. Ian also doesn't have anything against Iris seeing his items, but he doesn't want her to start changing any of them. In other words, each author wants to be sure that no one else will do anything in his or her "playground" area.

Sometimes authors collaborate on the authoring of certain items. In this case, it’s necessary to maintain a collaborative ‘scratch’ folder which all item authors can work in.

Once their items are ready to be incorporated into tests, they will need access to the folders which correspond to the type of items they have been authoring. For example, if Ian has been developing items for a Grade 6 Math test in trigonometry, he must be able to put his finished items in the appropriate folder.

Tessa will also need access to that folder in order to put together the Grade 6 Math test, as well as her own workspace (scratch folder).

Theoretically, until restrictions are in place, they could all do things in each other's folders, so how can we stop them doing that? The way to do this is to set the access permissions accordingly. You will need to install the Access Control extension (TAO extension: taoDacSimple) for this. In the next lesson we’ll see how to grant or restrict access to certain libraries and folders.