In multi-user Relay, user groups are a convenient way of granting permissions. For example, if you want to grant permissions to everyone in the Quality Management team, you can create a Quality Management user group and add and remove users from this group to reflect the membership of the team.
To maintain user groups, go to the Settings folder and select the Sytem settings icon. In system settings, select the User groups icon to see the list of user groups.
New user group
From the user group list, use New user group to create a new user group.
- Give the user group a Name.
- Do not set the Reference.
- Provide a Description if you want.
- Do not set Use this user group to create new users option.
Use Create to create the user group.
When you have created the user group, you will be shown the user group details page.
You need to make sure that other administrators can manage this group. Select Permissions to open up the user group permissions page.
In the User or group column, select the Process client administrators group, and in the Permission column select Administer user group, and use Add to add the permission. The permissions page should then look something like the above screenshot.
When you have added the permission, use Close to close the permissions page.
Add and remove user group members
To add a user, go to the user groups details page and select the person you want from the drop-down list, and use Add to add them. Use Remove to remove them.
In this screenshot, Carol Jones has been added to the user group.
Do not add the Anonymous user. This is a special user which is used when you want to publish web content.
Delete user group
To delete a user group
To delete a user group, go to the user group details page and use the Delete button to confirm delete of the user group. You will be asked to confirm the deletion.
Deleting a user group does not delete the users within the user group.
Owning user groups
The portal has three types of user group.
- Normal user groups, for grouping users for permissions, as described above.
- Individual user groups. Each user automatically has a user group with just them in, named the same as them. This means you can use an individual user wherever a user group is required.
- Owning user groups. These are a "home" user group into which the user is put when they are created and from which they are removed when they are deleted. A user is always in only one owning user group.
Portal accounts are set up with a single owning user group, called Account Name Users.
In nearly all cases, using a single owning user group is the best option.
You can use additional owning user groups to create separate pools of users for delegated user management. To do this:
- When creating a new user group, select the Use this user group to create new users option.
- In user group permissions, give Administer owning user group and Maintain Users to the user group to which you want to delegate this group of users.
- In user group permissions:
- If you also want the general administrators to maintain the new user group, grant Administer owning user group and Maintain Users permissions to Process Client Administrators.
- If you only want the new user group to work with Relay, but not allow the process client administrators to maintain the new group, grant Grant to user group permissions to Process Client Administrators.
- When creating a New user, ensure that the new owning user group is selected in the Owning group field.
In most cases, it would be better to use normal user groups to represent departments, and give departmental administrators permissions over their own user groups. If the departments were so separate that they needed to create and delete their own users, they would probably be better managed as separate instances of the portal and Relay.
There is a method to move users from one owning user group to another. However, this is not available through the setting screens because delegated user management is usually embedded into other features and it would not be safe to expose owning user group change without managing the other features too. If you need to move users from one owning group to another, ask support for assistance or instructions.
Note to support: this requires the ChangeOwningUserGroup service which can be run through the Submit service option available when session protection has been switched off.