In Sigma, everything starts with an account. Think of the account as the entire universe for your company's data and analytics. It's the highest-level container that holds everything else. It’s the house.

Inside that house, you have an organization. The organization is your specific instance of Sigma where all your data connections, workbooks, and users live. Most companies just have one organization, but it's possible for a single account to manage several, keeping them separate.

With the structure in place, we can start adding people. In Sigma, every person who needs to log in and do work is considered a user.

A user account on its own doesn't have any power. It's like having a key to the building but not to any of the rooms inside. To give users the ability to do things—like view a report, edit a workbook, or connect to a database—we use roles.

Think of a role like a job title. An 'Accountant' has access to financial software, while a 'Salesperson' has access to the customer database. Instead of giving each person individual permissions one by one, you just assign them the role that fits their job. This makes managing access much simpler. If you need to change what all accountants can do, you just update the 'Accountant' role, and the change applies to everyone with that title.

So, we have users and we have roles. How do we connect them? That's where grants come in. A grant is the final, crucial step that officially gives a user the permissions of a role.

When you grant a user the 'Creator' role, you are creating a link between that user and the set of permissions defined in the 'Creator' role. The user can now create, edit, and publish workbooks because the grant is active.

Let's walk through an example. A new analyst, Jane, joins your team.

1. First, an administrator creates a user account for Jane in your Sigma organization.
2. Jane needs to build her own reports, so the administrator decides the 'Creator' role is appropriate.
3. The administrator then grants the 'Creator' role to Jane's user account.

Instantly, Jane can log in and access all the permissions associated with the Creator role. If Jane ever moves to a new position where she only needs to view reports, the administrator can simply revoke the 'Creator' grant and give her a 'Viewer' grant instead. There's no need to manage a long list of individual permissions.

Ready to check your understanding? Let's see what you've learned.

Understanding these five components—accounts, organizations, users, roles, and grants—is the foundation for managing access securely and efficiently in Sigma.