This tool is for managing administrative roles.

Roles are special accounts, used to grant rights to administrators. Included in each role's properties is a list of users who are entitled to assume that role, and a list of the rights granted to that role.

When users assume a role, they relinquish the properties of their own user account and take on the properties of the role -- including the rights, home directory, password and so forth. You can think of root as a role with all rights; other roles have more limited rights.

(If you selected Administrative Roles in the right pane, click Action->Open to see a list of existing roles, if any. The Action menu will then change to provide the options described below.)

For more about administrative roles, see Rights for Users and Roles.