Do you have a guide/summary about what each role can do/has access to?

Yes! There is a Community article here and we have a downloadable roles & permissions tracker here:

Are all these functions we are seeing and types of reports (what they are for, how to run them, etc.) documented somewhere to follow?

• Cleaning Up Your Bridge Content
• Cleaning Up Your Bridge Users
   

Removing users from your instance is easiest done by?

If you are auto-provisioning users into your account from your HRIS or another source of truth, you will need to make sure that users who are terminated are not being populated ont the file.

Manually, the easiest way to remove users is to use the "remove via csv" in the user management area. All that is required to remove with csv is a column of UIDs of the users you’d like to delete. They will then be placed in a terminated state where they can be reactivated and their data recovered if needed. Terminated users can be filtered to view in user management, and you can also include terminated users in Analytics.

We go into this in more detail in our article, Cleaning Up Your Bridge Users.

Which report do you pull to show all the permissions?

There are two ways to get the same export of all active users and their roles:

• Admin > Users & Permissions > Manage Users > Export Users (blue hyperlink)
• Admin > Users & Permissions > Quick Actions > Export All Users (side navigation)

We go into this in more detail in our help article, Cleaning Up Your Bridge Users.

Is there a way you can set an approval process for publishing on new courses created by authors who aren't admins, for admins to review and approve publishing?

You can accomplish this by creating a “Quality Control” custom role. This is a custom role that strips away the publishing permission. This essentially makes your Authors a gatekeeper for what material gets published (and, in turn, to be made available to your learners). You would need to give all Managers and Authors this custom role that prohibits publishing. Keep in mind, tracking manager changes and continuously applying a custom role to new managers can be a cumbersome administrative task. 

You may want to check out our article on setting up managers in Bridge.
 

How do I have a test user with AutoCSV enabled?

If a test or dummy user is not included in the file feed being sent to Bridge for user management, you can turn off autoCSV to create a test user, but anything that is created would be removed at the next sync. There is a workaround to this where Account Admins do not get terminated, but then all of the test users will have the full weight of all permissions. You can also leverage masquerading if just needing to view as a user.

For more in depth testing, you could affiliate content to a testing sub-account to do your experiments! We have a sample test plan here.

Is it a bad idea to masquerade as specific learners?

Masquerading is a critical feature to not only test but to also confirm behaviors and ensure that content is behaving as expected.

Masquerading as a learner will do two things:

• Modify the last logged_in date (when masquerading, it’s as if the learner is logged into the account
• Actions will persist (if you complete a course, that course is completed for the learner as if the learner completed it)

If you are aware of these two things, then we highly recommend masquerading.

What if I want to delete custom fields for users because they aren’t being used?

If you go to user management and click on “add via CSV,” you can start the mapping exercise. If a custom field is not being used by a smart group, there will be an “x” next to that field.

You can remove the field with that “x” and cancel out of the job, or you can finish the job to make any desired updates

In the example above, the fields like “Manager Group” do not have an “x” because they are leveraged by multiple smart groups, so the field cannot be deleted.

I’m using Tags but not Categories. Am I doing it wrong?
 

Not wrong! Categories are just another tool in the toolbox to offer you options for organization (both learner-facing and admin-facing). See more of our articles on categories:

• How do I create and manage categories in an account?
• How do I add categories to a learning content item in an account?
• How do I use categories to help manage my content?
• How to use categories and smart groups to map the right content