Roles

Inbuilt Security
We use Roles for the main component that provides security access throughout the portal. The inbuilt roles of Administrator, Staff and Member provide the most common security setup to allow users to edit their own details. The inbuilt Member role has security to allow address lookup, helpdesk (service desk) and mydetails (which allows them to edit basic information about themselves). These are backend services that you can enable or disable.

Your Website Security
You can use roles to allow access to webpages and document libraries. Every webpage and document library allows you to grant access to it, this means you can use roles to give users access to resources they need.

Scenario: If you provide resources to paying members, you can give users a role automatically when they subscribe and pay through subscriptions. New members can get access to resources automatically without you having to grant them access.

Programs

Programs like Roles have a start and end date, so you can see this in their member summary.

Basic
We use programs to for several reasons, just to tag that a user is part of a particular organisational track (this could be a traineeship or a new HR initiative or even a sale pipeline like leads). You can use programs as simply as just a start date and optional finish date.

Advanced
Programs can also be much more, should you want them to be. You can setup activities and program administration to track a real large scale training program, like medical doctors becoming specialists over 4 years. You can also setup a basic CRM scoring setting tracking when a sales pipeline milestone has been completed.

You can make programs/activities visible to the user, so they can self serve completing tasks, or it can be completely backoffice tracking where staff administer the activities.

Tags

Tags are for categorising your current members, you can create tags to put people into regions or flags for activities and generally for anything you want.

We created tags to make it easy to include/exclude tagged members from the main member search screen. We also created these so you didn't get an overly large list of programs and roles to cater for identify all the different types of members.

Subscriptions

Of course you can identify your members by the subscription they are on too, as you create subscriptions, you can quickly filter users by specific subscriptions.