I'm assuming you're wondering about configuring resources themselves under either the Role itself or Resource Profiles. Generally, you can achieve the same thing both ways. But what I've found to be best is to make something a Resource Profile if you will be assigning it to more than one Role. If you make Resource Profiles for everything, you'll end up with an enormous list of profiles and a bunch of 1:1 [Role:Resource Profile] mappings anyway. So for example, we have a lot of partner/vendor roles configured, where there really isn't much duplication of resources. They all access different things, so this is where we generally put resources within the Role itself. For our internal employee resources though, we generally make Resource Profiles so that they can easily be assigned to multiple Roles. To more specifically answer your question about roles being a user thing and profiles being more global, the answer is "kind of." While you can map a specific user(s) to a role, it is just as often done by AD or LDAP groups. Resource Profiles aren't "global" per se, since you still need to assign them to roles. But like I said, it's easier to assign Resource Profiles to multiple roles.
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