What is a permissions model, and why does resource booking need one?
Who gets to manage rooms, analyze booking data, or book on behalf of others? The bigger a company gets, and the more locations, legal entities, and areas of responsibility it has, the harder that question is to answer. A good permissions model doesn’t try to give as many answers as possible. It gives the clearest ones.
In a small company, assigning permissions is usually still manageable. A handful of employees book desks and rooms, and a few people handle administration. But once you add multiple locations, business units, legal entities, or distinct areas of responsibility, a simple model quickly hits its limits.
Should the site admin in Munich be able to edit rooms in Hamburg? Should managers be able to see individual employees’ bookings? Who manages the use of special-purpose spaces? And does someone with admin duties automatically need access to personal data?
The seemingly simple question of “Who can do what?” quickly becomes a fundamental organizational challenge.
Gingco Share solves it with a dedicated roles and permissions model built on the need-to-know principle. With more than 150 individual permissions, you can restrict access across three core pillars: users, objects, and locations.
But technology is only part of the solution. What really matters is how permissions are structured so they stay clear, maintainable, and adaptable as your organization changes.
Many permissions models start out very simple: employees can book, admins can manage. In more complex organizations, that setup no longer works. A site manager may need extensive management rights, but only for their own location. An assistant should be able to book for specific people without being able to change the system configuration. And central admins need system-wide functions without automatically gaining visibility into personal data.
This is where a professional permissions model comes in. It doesn’t just answer which functions someone can use and which role they hold, but also:
Gingco Share combines these three dimensions with custom roles and permission groups. That lets you tailor permissions precisely to specific tasks and build them around areas of responsibility.
Every permissions model has to steer clear of two opposite risks:
Too few permissions get in the way of everyday work. Employees can’t complete tasks on their own, constantly need help from admins, and processes become needlessly complicated.
Too many permissions, on the other hand, increase the risk of user errors and unnecessary access to sensitive information.
So the challenge isn’t to be as restrictive or as generous as possible. It’s to grant exactly the permissions a specific task requires. That’s the principle of least privilege, or need-to-know: employees only get access to the system areas, functions, and information they need to do their jobs.
That way, roles and permissions aren’t an obstacle, but an important security mechanism. They reduce user errors, limit unnecessary access, and keep responsibilities clear, even in larger organizations.
Let’s take a company with:
A global admin permission would be easy to set up, but it would give local managers access to areas they aren’t even responsible for.
That’s why it makes more sense to separate responsibilities:
| Role | Task | Permission group | Possible restriction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employees | Book resources | Booker | Approved objects and locations |
| Assistant | Book on behalf of others | Delegate booker | Defined user groups and locations |
| Site admin | Manage resources | Object admin | Own location |
| Parking management | Manage parking spaces | Management | Object group (parking) and location |
| Facility management | Cross-site management and coordination | Management | Defined buildings and locations |
| IT | System configuration | System admin | System areas |
These are exactly the kinds of organizational boundaries the Gingco Share roles and permissions model is designed to reflect. Management rights can be limited to locations, buildings, areas, object groups, or individual objects, for example. Booking on behalf of employees, teams, external guests, or executives can also be controlled through the appropriate roles.
In theory, every permission could be assigned to every person individually. But in a company with hundreds or thousands of employees, that would be almost impossible to manage over time. That’s why individual permissions are bundled into roles, also called permission groups.
Gingco Share provides predefined global, local, and functional permission groups that you can customize and extend. Individual permissions can be moved between groups or combined into new roles. You can also build a hierarchy: higher-level roles inherit the permissions of the groups below them and add more on top.
This turns a long list of one-off decisions into a structured model. Instead of “Person A gets permissions 17, 22, 43, 65, and 84,” the organizational decision becomes, for example: “Person A takes on the role of ‘Local Site Admin, Braunschweig’.”
That’s easier to understand, easier to trace, and above all, easier to maintain.
The next challenge comes as soon as the company changes. An employee moves to another department. A site manager takes over an additional building. Someone leaves the company. A new subsidiary is integrated.
If these changes have to be replicated manually in your resource management software, keeping things up to date quickly turns into an ongoing headache. That’s why Gingco Share can assign and revoke roles based on rules, using a range of attributes such as department, Active Directory group membership, cost center, location, or other custom attributes supplied by source systems.
Employee, organizational, and location data can be imported and synced centrally from existing services, identity providers, or HR systems. That way, organizational changes flow automatically into user and role management.
This matters most during onboarding and offboarding.
This doesn’t just reduce administrative effort. It also lowers the risk of old permissions quietly lingering after a role change or departure.
A common misconception about permissions: the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more you automatically get to see.
For a privacy-first permissions model, that’s exactly the problem. A leadership position or high security clearance doesn’t automatically justify access to personal booking information. Access to sensitive information can be limited to the user groups that actually need it and are allowed to have it.
So the principle is simple: access isn’t determined by hierarchy, but by task, purpose, and authorization.
A roles and permissions model isn’t just about IT security. Desk, room, and resource bookings in particular can involve processing personal data.
That’s why these questions should be settled early on:
To support this, Gingco Share offers role-based access, configurable retention and deletion rules, and anonymized occupancy and usage data, utilization analytics, and statistics. Reporting options can be controlled based on your configuration and internal policies.
Within the framework of the relevant codetermination agreements, employees can also decide for themselves who gets to see their own booking data.
Permission management gets especially demanding in enterprise environments. Multiple legal entities may share the same booking system but need to keep their resources and data organizationally separate. Central teams need cross-entity functions, while local managers should only be able to manage their own region.
Gingco Share can separate permissions by legal entity, business unit, and organizational unit, which means it can also map group-wide structures spanning multiple locations and countries.
For example, you could set up a model in which:
A permissions model that grows with your organization and scales with your business.
Before setting up permission groups on the technical side, it pays to step back and look at the big picture. At a minimum, a solid permissions model should cover:
Answer these questions before years of ad hoc individual permissions snowball into a model no one can keep track of.
Employees, assistants, site managers, or central administration: with clearly defined roles and permissions, you create clear lines of responsibility and stay on top of even complex structures. Gingco Share combines granular permission management with organizational restrictions and automation.
Key building blocks include:
Before you configure roles, make sure you’ve answered these questions: