ZenTao vs. Jira 7: Permission - Agile

Although Scrum emphasizes transparency and close collaboration of the team work, permissions should always be properly assigned.

Jira

Permissions in Jira range from high-level to granular. Generally speaking, there are three types of them: global, project, and issue security permissions.

Jira functions by permissions and is restricted Jira administrators, project administrators, or board administrators.

A Jira administrator is a user with global permission.
A project administrator is a user with project permission to a particular project.
A board administrator is a user that has been added to the Admin group for a particular board.

ZenTao

Like most of project management tools, permissions in ZenTao are managed by user groups. There are also three types of permissions in ZenTao.

View privileges: privileges that can be set globally by views, such as Product, Project, etc. (Refer to Image 1&2)
Product/Project privileges: access control set when creating a product. (Refer to Image 3)
Standalone privileges: Limited Actions and Limited Users. (Refer to Image 4)

> View Privileges

In ZenTao, view privileges are managed by user group, such as Guest (see the screenshot below), Administrators, etc. Choose Guest and click view privileges.

Image 1: Manage View Privileges

Uncheck one view, such as Product, the guest user group will have no access to the Product view at all.
For Access Product, if you leave it blank, it means the guest user can access to all products.
For Access Project, if you chose a project, such as testpro1, the guest user will only be able to access Project testpro1(Leave it blank to set no access limit).

You can also set privileges by modules in ZenTao. For example, you can set actions in Dashboard, Todo, and Effort under Dashboard view.

Image 2: Manage View Privileges By Modules

> Product/Project Privileges

ZenTao users often ask why they can't see the stories in a project, even though they have created stories for a product and I have the privileges.

Here is the thing. VERY IMPORTANT. User stories are closely related to products as everything in ZenTao is based on the product management. The philosophy is to create stories for a product. Then a project or several projects are created for the product and linked to it. If so, the stories of the product will be listed for users to link them to the project that has been linked to the product as long as stories are in Active status, not Draft.

Image 3: ACL for Products

When creating a product, ZenTao user can choose three types of privileges. Default means users will have the privileges set in Company->Privileges. Private means the product is visible to users of projects that have been linked to the product. Custom means that the product can be visited by team members and users set on the whitelist.

> Standalone Privileges

Standalone privileges in ZenTao are managed via Limited Users. For newcomers, you can go to Company->Privilege->Limited Users and add the user to Limited User group. Then the user can only edit contents that involve him/her, such as CreatedByMe, AssignedToMe, etc.

Generally speaking, privileges in ZenTao are much flexible as it is designed By an agile team that understand what an agile team want and supports Scrum for being responsive and adaptive. For more information about privilege management in ZenTao, click HERE. You can also try the online demo to see how it goes.

Reference

1. https://www.zentao.pm/book/zentaomanual/free-open-source-project-management-software-groupsandprivileges-25.html

2. https://confluence.atlassian.com/get-started-with-jira-core/manage-permissions-917965390.html

3. https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/limit-restrict-user-s-project-access-280069544.html