We are finding that the user roles defined in Populi are not adequate. We have a number of staff in our college that should be able to do certain things, such as write mass emails or make comments on students' profiles for only other staff (like financial officer) to see. However, we don't want to give all those people the ability to change a student's profile or delete all the messages off of the news feed (which has already happened to us).
Also, it doesn't make much sense for us to use Teaching Assistant since they have all the privileges of a Faculty member. For us a T.A. would be a student who wanted to make some money on the side, and would simply do the grading of assignments and reporting marks. They shouldn't have the ability to add a new assignment, or make changes to assignments that are currently posted. Ideally, the Faculty member would only be able to make those changes.
In an ideal world Populi would let us create user roles & assign them privileges based on the need. So we could create a user role such as "General Staff" that would just have the rights to view student profiles, send out communications, and change their photo. Then we could create a role such as "Administrative Staff" that could do things like delete the messages off of the news feed, and modify student profiles, etc. For the teaching assistant role we could remove privileges, such as modifying assignments, etc.
Realistically we could use finer control on user roles and privileges that would allow us to grant certain privileges to custom user groups.
