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User Groups
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User groups are a convenient way to assign multiple people local roles. This is the main reason some firms may wish to create user groups. The OpenEngagement DMS ships with no predefined groups, but users may create as many groups as they wish. Most firms will not create any groups, but in some cases they may be convenient.
The OpenEngagement DMS allows assigning Groups local roles the same as individual users may be assigned local roles. Groups are simply a collection of users. For example, a site may include many users, including Alice, Bob and Carol. If an Engagement Manager wishes to assign Alice, Bob and Carol the Reviewer role for numerous engagements, the Engagement Manager may create a group consisting of those three users and assign that group the local role Reviewer. This is effectively the same as assigning Alice and Bob and Carol that role, but may be a bit quicker.
It takes some time to create groups, and if there are many combinations of users, such that many groups must be created, they may just create more confusion than benefit. Where a site has the same combination of users given the same local roles for many objects, groups may be useful, though.
Groups may also be useful where a firm wishes to assign a group to local role, say Entity Manager for many Entities, then later dynamically change the membership for this group. For example, a Manager can create a Group called Senior-Partners, which consists Alice, Bob and Carol. The Manager may then assign this group the Entity Manager role for, say, 300 Entities. After firing these people and replacing them with Alison, Brad and Cynthia, the Manager may simply change the membership of the Senior-Partners group, and these three users will now have the Entity Manager role for the 300 Clients.
It is not possible to have hierarchies of groups. That is, you cannot define groups of groups of users. This should not present any real limitation to OpenEngagement DMS users.
There may be some confusion between the concepts of users being in user groups and users having roles. One key difference is users can have different roles in different locations of the site, but their membership in the user groups is site-wide. The user groups may, though, have different roles in different locations of the site.