Grant read/read-write access to SSAS cubes

Question

I have a requirement to grant read access on SSAS cubes to one windows group and read/write access to another group. I have multiple SSAS cubes on my server.

The question is:

1. What minimum rights should I grant to the user?
2. Is there a way to apply this rights on multiple cubes. As manually creating roles on each SSAS cubes is painful. I have lot of SSAS cubes. So looking for an easy way to do this.

Answer 1

Writeback permissions are a bit tricky. I documented them here. The relevant part is:

Next, build a separate Writeback role. On the Cubes tab, grant Read/Write, check Process, and (optionally) Drillthrough permissions. I’m frankly not sure why you need Process permissions to perform ROLAP writeback, but it appears you need Process permissions for ROLAP or MOLAP writeback.

In the Data Sources tab, make sure to grant Read permissions on the data source used for writeback. For example, when I created my writeback partition, I used the Greg Test data source to direct that writeback table to live in another database (such as a database with Full recovery model).

Sounds like you already figured it out but we can document this for posterity.