The SAS implementation of roles enables administrators
to manage the availability of application features such as menu items,
plug-ins, and buttons. Applications that have roles include the SAS
Add-In for Microsoft Office, SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Forecast Studio,
SAS Management Console, and SAS Web Report Studio. For example, role
memberships determine whether a user can see the Server Manager plug-in
(in SAS Management Console), compare data (in SAS Enterprise Guide),
or directly open an information map (in SAS Web Report Studio). Administrators
can assign roles to users and to groups.
An application
feature that is under role management is called a capability. Each
application that supports roles provides a fixed set of explicit and
implicit capabilities. Explicit capabilities can be incrementally
added to or removed from any role (other than the unrestricted role,
which always provides all explicit capabilities). An implicit capability
is permanently bound to a certain role. A contributed capability is
an implicit or explicit capability that is assigned through role aggregation.
If one role is designated as a contributing role for another role,
all of the first role's capabilities become contributed capabilities
for the second role.
In general, roles are
separate from permissions and do not affect access to metadata or
data.