User management introduction

Effective user and role management is key to maintaining secure, structured, and efficient collaboration within Xperience by Kentico. As a digital experience platform (DXP), (Xperience by Kentico) empowers organizations to control access, streamline content workflows, and ensure users have the correct permissions.

This short series focuses specifically on managing users and user roles that have access to the Xperience administration interface (Admin UI). It will guide you through the essentials — signing in, creating and managing users, and defining user roles for a well-organized and secure environment.

By mastering these foundational skills, admins, marketers, and content editors can optimize workflows, enforce security best practices, and create a flexible yet cohesive system tailored to their business needs. Whether you’re setting up new users or defining user roles, this series will help you get started with confidence.

Let’s have a look at the definition of core concepts.

Users in Xperience by Kentico

Simply put, a User is any person with access to the backend of Xperience by Kentico. Users can sign in to and work with the Xperience administration interface. Whether you are a content editor, marketer, or a global admin taking care of the whole Xperience administration, you are represented by a user entity. In other words, users work with the applications from the administration – they create content, define marketing activities, or send emails.

Roles in Xperience by Kentico

A Role (referred to here as a user role) defines a collection of permissions for what a user can do in Xperience administration. A user role gives you access to different applications in Xperience administration and tells you whether you can create or delete content like an image, add a new page, or send an email.

Roles are not exclusive; you can define and assign one general user role to several users. You can imagine user roles as tags that you can add to users; if they have more roles, they will get the sum of all permissions.

Imagine a company where everyone is doing their assigned job and has a different user role than the others. Everything works fine until you realize you need person A to fill in for person B. What to do? Assign B’s user role to A, and you’re all set. Person A now has two user roles.

Permissions assigned to user roles give you access to all the necessary features. You can focus on doing your job without being overwhelmed with other Xperience applications you don’t need. The set of role permissions will declutter your dashboard and save you time when looking for the correct application.

If you are an administrator, you need to put some thought into user role creation, though. If you set up a user role with unnecessary permissions, users assigned to that role can end up in the wrong place, editing the wrong content, or otherwise breaking the existing application flow. On the other hand, if you are too strict or forget to include crucial permissions for a given user role, the user might be unable to perform their job.

Members in Xperience by Kentico

Visitors who register an account in your application are called members. Unlike users who can access the Xperience UI administration, members can access only the front-facing part of your application, like a website. Once they create their account and become members, they can browse the website pages or access restricted, member-only sections.

Xperience applications for managing users and roles

Xperience comes with two built-in applications you can use to create, manage, and review users and roles:

• Users application allows you to add new users, edit current ones, or add them to user roles.
• Role management application allows you to create new user roles and assign or change permissions for existing user roles.