Creating Groups and Granting Permissions

Groups enable you to restrict access to Web views or administrative features. Typically, groups match the different roles in a process. For example, if you have separate groups for employees and help desk staff, you can prevent employees from opening the same Web views used by the help desk staff.

Vector HelpDesk includes several built-in groups that cannot be deleted: Users, Admins, and Guests. It also includes several sample groups that reflect basic help desk roles: Employees, HelpDesk-Analysts, and HelpDesk-GroupLeads.

If a help desk analyst is responsible for administering the your system, you can make the analyst a member of both HelpDesk-Analysts and Admins. As a member of Admins, the analyst has full access to all administrative features.

 

You can have several different admin-type groups, with each group providing a different level of access to administrative capabilities. For example, a basic admin group could allow members to create new user accounts and update contact information, while other admin groups could:

    Create fields, edit choice lists, rename tabs, change workflow.

    Create reports, queries, sorts, and layouts, define notifications.

    Create projects, delete records, perform database maintenance, set up notifications.

About the Built-in Groups

Users

All users are automatically members of the Users group. You cannot remove users from this group, or delete it. Permissions granted to this group apply to all users, and cannot be overridden.

Admins

Members of the Admin group have complete access to all projects and administrative features. You cannot disable features or projects for the Admins group.

Guests

The Guests group is intended for users who are not full-time employees, such as customers or visitors from other companies.

Features

Features allow you to control:

    Who can use the Ad-hoc Query Editor, generate reports, update contact information, view revision histories, or change their password in a Web view.

    Who can log on to HelpDesk Admin, HelpDesk Web Admin, and the Web View Editor.

    Who can use certain tools in HelpDesk Admin and HelpDesk Web Admin. For example, who can edit workflow rules in HelpDesk Web Admin, and who can create reports or edit fields in HelpDesk Admin.

Projects

When you create a project, you specify which groups can open the project. Groups allowed to open a project can:

    Log on to Web views of the project (if they also have permission to open the view).

    Edit the project in HelpDesk Admin.

    Edit views of that project in Web View Editor, or generate new views of that project.

Admins can always open a project. Instead of allowing Users to open a project, you should allow specific groups. That way you can grant access permissions to views on a group-by-group basis in the Web View Editor.

Views

Groups allowed to open a view can log on to the view. A group must be allowed to open the project before it can be allowed to open a view.

Remember that if members of the Users group are allowed to open the view, then any user can open the view.

Related Topics

Defining User Groups

Enabling and Disabling Features

Enabling and Disabling Projects

Setting Group Access Permissions for Web Views