User and Group administration and tracking

Users can be in groups - managed via users and groups administration in the setup. Groups can be given particular roles if need be - all users in that group will gain the given role.

It is very rare that only one user will ever have a given role. More likely, there will be a group of users with the same role in the portal - and even where there is currently only one user (say, only one site manager), it often makes sense to cater for the possibility that there will be more users later on. Since users can be in several groups at the same time, you can get fine grained control over permissions and classifications of users using this mechanism.

It is also legitimate to use groups to logically group users without assigning any special roles. This has the added advantage that members will gain a shared group folder.