At a client meeting this morning, I was reminded that the Percussion Rhythmyx Web CMS supports roles, but not groups. For larger, distributed enterprises, or those with multiple web properties, the distinction can become important.

As Web CMS Report 2009 readers know, a surprising number of tools support roles but not groups, or groups but not roles. (To be fair, Rhythmyx has a kind of poor substitute called "communities.")

Why does this matter? Well, roles helpfully circumscribe what a contributor can do, but groups are handy for defining where and how. And groups can often be nested, which is useful within larger or more complex operations. The screen from our WCM Education course shows some example roles and groups.

Without groups, if you need to distinguish HR editors from Marketing editors, you end up creating roles like HR_editor and Marketing_editor, which is a clumsy and less maintainable work-around.

To learn more, consider signing up for the course.