In the Version 88 release (June 21, 2026) we are retiring the Project Owner role in favor of Project Roles.

If you are a Project Owner today, you do not need to do anything. We will automatically migrate you to a Role that has exactly the same permissions, so nothing changes about what you can do. The rest of this post explains the migration, how creating Projects changes, and - for those interested - why we made the change.

Migration

As part of the Version 88 release process we will find every Project that has a Project Owner assigned. In the URL for that Project we will create a Role called "Project Owner" with every permission set. If a URL already has a Role named "Project Owner", we will name the new Role "Project Owner (migrated)" instead. Every user who is a Project Owner will then be migrated to this new Role in their Project.

Organizations that have no users assigned as Project Owner in any of their Projects will not have this Role created.

Creating new Projects

In Version 88 the Project creation page looks a little different:

When you open the page it will automatically select your username and the "No role" option.

You must either select a Role for yourself (or another user), or set the Username option to "No user" and the Role to "No role".

Note that in a brand-new URL you will need to create at least one Role before this dropdown can be populated.

Why we are making this change

When we built TrialGrid in 2016, the first feature was running Diagnostics on Medidata Rave study builds. We wanted that to be fast: log in, create a Project, load an ALS, run Diagnostics - so the person who created a Project became its Project Owner, a role with every permission in that Project.

Ten years on, TrialGrid is much more than a study-build checker. Most work now happens through Project Roles: named sets of permissions, such as creating Drafts, editing objects, or applying labels. A Role lets Data Managers, Clinical Programmers and others work together in a Project, each with their own responsibilities. Against that, a single all-powerful Project Owner has become an awkward fit:

• There can be only one Project Owner. To share that ownership you have to use Project Roles anyway.
• Our larger customers do not use it, and many actively avoid it, preferring to manage every Project through defined Project Roles rather than a single owner.
• Licensing. A Project Owner has every permission, which makes them a Full License user. If your organization only licenses Rave Diagnostics, seeing Full License users in your user listings causes confusion and the worry that you are under-licensed.

All in all, TrialGrid's functionality and adoption have outgrown the original Project Owner concept. The migration we have put in place means every user keeps the same permissions they had before, now within a more streamlined structure.