Rollen

If you’re already using Zammad, you’ll know that users can be admins, agents, or customers. These are Zammad’s built-in roles, and they’re the tip of the iceberg of its powerful, flexible, and fine-grained permission system.

Role overview within Zammads admin settings.

Assign user privileges in the Admin Panel, under Manage > Roles.

Bemerkung

👀 Users can have both “agent” and “customer” roles at the same time!

Why would you want this? Agents get overviews of all the tickets they’re assigned to (among other things), while customers get an overview of all the tickets they’ve opened. But some teams use Zammad for both internal and public communication, so their agents need both.

Having both roles also changes what you see in the ticket view, depending on whether you’re the “customer” or not.

Tipp

💡 LDAP/Active Directory users:

Syncing your LDAP “groups” to Zammad roles can make access management way easier. To learn more, see LDAP / Active Directory.

What Is a Role?

tl;dr Some users can do things others can’t (like close a ticket). Users have roles, roles have permissions, and permissions are what make those actions possible.

So what exactly are permissions, then?

List of permissions in the New Role dialog

The admin.calendar permission gives you access to the Manage > Calendars admin panel.

Simply put, permissions are names for all the different things users might want to do throughout the system, such as:

chat.agent

respond to live chat messages

ticket.agent

update tickets

admin.user

access the Manage > Users admin panel

knowledge_base.editor

create/edit knowledge base articles

Zammad has dozens of these permissions, which is a lot to keep track of. So instead of saying “This user has permissions A, B, and C”, Zammad says “The agent role has permissions A, B, and C, and this user is an agent.”

This makes creating user accounts for new agents a whole lot simpler, and it also makes it easier to invent a new permission D and say “All existing agents can do that now, too.”

In short, roles are just collections of permissions that you can give to a user. The built-in admin, agent, and customer roles are enough for many teams, but Zammad gives you the freedom to custom-build your own.

And to do that, you’ll need to know what each permission does.

Reference Guide: Permissions

Broadly speaking, there are four types of permissions:

🛡️ Admin

for access to each page of the Admin Panel

🕵️ Agent

for access to customer communications

👤 Customer

Without the ticket.customer permission, customers can’t see the My Ticket overview—but they can still log in and open new tickets!

🎛️ User Preferences

for access to your own user profile

Bemerkung

📁 Permissions are namespaced, which is sort of like having files inside of folders.

These permissions:

  • admin.api

  • admin.branding

  • admin.calendar

  • admin.channel_chat

  • admin.channel_email

  • …and 30+ more

all belong to the admin namespace. You can select them individually, or you can just select admin to enable the whole bunch.

Role Details

Aktiv bei Neuanmeldung

Every new user must be assigned at least one role upon creation. This attribute decides which role to give new users by default (which usually happens when creating a new ticket for a new customer).

Role overview in the admin panel, showing default role

The default role is identified in the overview of the Manage > Roles admin panel.

Warnung

🙅 Standard-Rollen sollten niemals Admin- oder Agenten-Berechtigen beinhalten.