The Groups feature is flexible enough to allow you to model any structure. You might want to use groups to represent an organizational hierarchy, as described in Use Groups for Organizational Hierarchy, as well as use groups to represent projects like described in Use Groups for Projects. This is supported and gives us all the advantages of both approaches.
Create Groups
We create the groups to represent organizational hierarchy using the sync process as described in the Use Groups for Organizational Hierarchy example. We create the groups to represent the projects manually as described in the Use Groups for Projects example. Collaborator remembers which groups were created manually and which were created using sync, so the sync process does not delete the manually created project groups.
Assign Group Members
Instead of manually naming each user that is a member of each project group like we did in the Use Groups for Projects example, we can indicate that all the members in an organizational hierarchy department are working on a project by making the organizational hierarchy group a child of the project group. This is much easier than assigning individual user members, but we lose some fine-grained control.
Associate Groups With Reviews
All of the organizational hierarchy groups have the Allow associate with review option set to No. The Western, SciFi, and Medieval project groups have the Allow associate with Review option set to Yes. We configure the singular group label to Project and the plural group label to Projects.
When users create a review it will be associated with a project group. If the organizational hierarchy group of the user defines they are members of only one project group, then when they create a review they do not have to manually choose a group – the review is automatically associated with the project group. If the organizational hierarchy group of the user defines them as a member of more than one project group, then when they create a review they are prompted to select one of those Projects to associate with the review.
Filter Participants List
When a user creates a review, they can choose to filter the participant list by that group. This lets a user filter the list of participants by only the users working on the project associated with the review. This is useful at large companies to make the list of users more manageable.
Restrict Access Based on Group
Access to reviews can be restricted based on associated group. The restriction can be set for all reviews or just for a particular review. For example, if a review was associated with the Western group and group access restriction was enabled, then only users working on the Western project would be able to access it.
Reporting Based on Group Membership
The reporting system can be used to create reports based on group membership. For example, all reviews where a member of a department was a participant, or all reviews created by a member of a department, and so on.
Reporting Based on Associated Group
You can also display, sort and filter reports by the associated group, so you know which project the review was for.
Finish Projects
When a project is finished, we mark its group as disabled. This means the group can no longer be associated with reviews, but it is still in the system for reporting purposes.