Managing users for flexible & streamlined creative production
What’s not to love about user management in SaaS? It offers distinct advantages over traditional on-premises solutions. It’s more flexible and simpler, allowing you to easily scale your user base up or down as needed without having to worry about configuring hardware or software. Today’s SaaS-based creative automation platforms – like CHILI GraFx – can now offer this type of versatile and robust user management tools as standard, and some are even be designed to ensure customer ROI through fair pricing of user seats.
User management has never been easier
If you hear the phrase “user management” and start imagining countless tasks for onboarding or setting up multiple environments for clients, fear not! SaaS makes these tasks infinitely easier through specialization, ensuring user roles are more precisely defined and better suited to business needs. What’s more, they can now often be securely managed by departmental stakeholders instead of IT gatekeepers.
With SaaS, user management is simple, streamlined, and scalable while remaining secure — a win-win for admins and users.
How flexible is user management in CHILI GraFx?
For agencies, brands, and retailers using the CHILI GraFx platform, flexibility in user management is essential.
CHILI GraFx offers capabilities for machine-to-machine automation as well as human-to-machine interactions. To achieve this, the platform defines specific roles for our platform’s use cases.
In the latest episode of CHILIpulse, Pieterjan Blondeel, Product Owner at CHILI publish, discusses how brands, retailers, or agencies can leverage different user roles on the CHILI GraFx platform:
- Subscription Admin: “The Boss of the Platform,” who manages the platform, with access to reporting, billing, and subscription information.
- Environment Admin: A user assigned to each environment. Responsible for inviting users to that specific environment and assigning permissions and roles within it.
- End User: A regular user who can be invited to an environment to work with the templates and assets within it.
- Template Designer: “The Star of the Platform,” who creates Smart Templates in GraFx Studio, then publishes and shares them with others who can utilize and scale them in their own role.
Pieterjan explains what these roles look like in practice:
For brands or retailers, you might set the marketing director as Subscription Admin. Then your creative director might be the Environment Admin. Your graphics designer would be a Template Designer, and your copywriter, the End User of the platform.
Pieterjan Blondeel
Product Owner - CHILI publish
Importantly for agencies with multiple clients, each client can be set up as its own environment, complete with an Environment Admin who can manage multiple environments and their users. Whether you have three users or 100, you’re only charged for Template Designer seats. This allows you to stay flexible, at scale, and on budget.
“Collaborative Silo”? Yep, that’s a good thing…
In some workplaces, you’ll hear the word “silo” used negatively. While it’s important to have interdepartmental communication so everyone understands your business’s main goals, silos can be beneficial in user management.
CHILI GraFx environments are a case in point. Environments are team-based, collaborative workspaces. Invites can be sent to internal or external users, and permissions can be managed down to the resource or app level. This ensures users aren't able to access non-permitted resources. In this sense, an environment acts as a silo that serves your business needs perfectly.
Agencies, brands, or retailers may set up company branches or brands to meet their own specific production needs. An agency may use multiple environments for multiple clients, where it onboards and offboards employees and freelancers. In such contexts, specialization coupled with flexibility in CHILI GraFx user management enables Admins to manage users for the specific use cases their creative automation processes call for.
What’s next for User Management in CHILI GraFx?
CHILI GraFx is evolving fast, so we asked Pieterjan what additions to user management we could expect in the coming months.
We’ll be incorporating SSO functionality within CHILI GraFx very soon. This will mean that platform-specific user creation is a thing of the past.
Pieterjan Blondeel
Product Owner - CHILI publish
We’re also excited to further build out how user groups are created and managed. Platform users will be able to dial in permissions on how certain media or forms are accessed. The central idea here is to make it as simple as possible to manage those users and boost creation at scale.
Pieterjan Blondeel
Product Owner - CHILI publish
Next steps
Looking to learn more about user management within CHILI GraFx? Watch episode 6 of CHILIpulse to discover how CHILI publish is finding market-specific ways for brands, agencies and retailers to improve user management within the Creative Automation space.
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