Contact & User Groups
Updated
by Niamh Ferns
User Groups Overview
Every company or organization will have different ways that they group their users. This may be into department, pods, by job role, or even by location. Initially, grouping in DeskDirector was very limited to using group tags. Not only was this very tedious to create and manage, it was also unintuitive.
To handle this, we introduced User Groups! With this feature, you can easily scope access for users in the client portal. It is much easier to use and manage while providing a more intuitive and visually appealing way to segment groups compared to using group tags. Now, you can easily create several groups under one company (e.g. HR, IT, Accounting, Management and others) and assign specific contacts for each!
User Groups Use Cases & Scenarios
User groups can cover many different scenarios. We will give few examples on what you can use it for:
Procurement
You can create procurement team for your client where you can add users inside as guests. When they create purchase requests, the managers of the user group can approve before proceeding.
Human Resources
You can create an HR team where each department's manager can create HR-related tickets. The human resource officer's manager can approve tickets or regular users of the group can add additional info to help process of the ticket.
Branch Segmentation
Your customer may have many different branches. By creating user group for branches, you can scope tickets to the relevant location. Users under that branch can be either regular or guest users, depends on what kind of scenario you want to cover.
School Class Rooms
Lecturers can manage class room groups where students or their parents can be guests of the user group. That way teaching staff can approve tickets that are created under that user group.
Hospital Nursing Teams
Nurse team can be created for a hospital, and nurses added into it. That way it allow them to share tickets. Nurse who works the night shift can see tickets that's created by other team members.
Scoped Ticket Access
The main advantage of user groups is scoping and grouping ticket access for your contacts. Originally, "All Tickets" permission would be granted to contacts that needs to see tickets their team submits. This worked but it created too much clutter. Specially, if you only intend to view tickets that belong to your team and not the whole company.
Scoped Approvals
User group feature also expands the existing approval workflow feature! In the past, each company could only have global approvers. This meant that, for example, an assigned approver from the IT team would receive notifications about pending approvals even if the ticket was intended for approvers in the billing team. This also posed some risk where approvers for one department should not have had access to specific information and as such weren't able to approve any tickets.
Now, you can assign group-specific approvers using user groups. The managers for any given group is approver of that group. Any tickets created for approval under that group will trigger an email notification to the group manager, and be able to approve them.
Global approvers can still be defined and used and they can approve tickets belonging to a specific groups. Such is for cases where managers/group-specific approvers are away.
Group-Specific Service Catalogues
You can now assign service groups to user groups. That way, users can only use specified Service Types to create tickets under any specified group. Such capability allows user groups to have a scoped domain. This also means you are able to limit what service types can be used under each user group, like billing-related request types for the billing team, and so on.
User Group Roles & Permissions
DeskDirector client portal uses roles to control the behavior of user groups. Different roles have different permissions.
Company Manager (User who has All Tickets Permission)
Company managers are users who has the All Tickets permission. They can add or remove users or change user's role inside any group even if they are not a manager of the group. In the future, we may allow company manager to create user groups.
Manager
Managers of user groups can view all tickets for that group. They are also an approver for the user group. Managers can also add, remove, or change a user's role within the group.
Regular
Regular users of user group can view all tickets within that group.
Guest
A guest of a user group can only view tickets they have created.
For example: you can create an HR group for a given company, then guests inside HR group can create ticket which will be approved by managers of the group. Regular users of HR group can check all tickets and add comments if needed.
Manager | Regular | Guest | C-Level | |
View all tickets under the group | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ✔️ |
View own tickets under the group | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Approve tickets | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ |
Add, remove other users | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ |
Change other user's role | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ |
Change own role | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ |
Create new group | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ (future) |
Modify group name and icon | ✔️ (future) | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ (future) |
Creating User Groups
User groups can be created for every company. This way, you can separate and group people into teams they belong in.
To create a group, login to your DeskDirector Admin portal then head to Portal > Settings, select the company then go to the User Groups tab.
Example of User Group List:
Creating a User Group
To create a group, click on the New Group button and you will be prompted to provide a Group name. For easier management and identification, it's best to use a short and direct group name like IT, HR, Billing, etc, and not random characters. Once you have provided the Group name, click on the Create button and your new user group has been created!
Managing a User Group
Managing user groups is pretty easy. From the user group's page, you can easily rename and/or change the group picture. You can also add/remove users to the group easily and also assign specific roles for users.
A Service Group can also be assigned to a User Group which is then inherited by the users in the group. If a user belongs to multiple groups, he will have access to the requests types assigned to the group he is assigned in (accumulative Service Types). Here's a sample showing a user belonging to 2 groups, showing the varied request type groups he has access to in the client portal:
Frequently Asked Questions
"Is this feature available for my DeskDirector license?"
Essential Plan license does not have access to this feature. Every other plan has access to it, unless explicitly stated.
"What is user group role?"
Each designated role in a user group, have corresponding permissions. You can check out user role for group article for more details.
"Can I disallow guest user to create ticket under the user group?"
By the time this feature is released, we don't have such capability. We are aware of the need for a POC (point of contact). We may expand this in the future when we look into POC in the future..
"What's the best practice on manage users inside group?"
MSPs can create group and add managers for their client. The user group manager can then manage users. MSP can also choose to help them manage or automate it.
"I have already separated users of my client to different companies, can user group help with that?"
No, user group does not support cross company. You can either add the user in different companies using the same email address to allow them to easily switch account, or merge companies inside Autotask or ConnectWise.
"How do we make sure tickets are created under user group?"
Tickets created under user groups will belong to that user group. Manager of the group can switch ticket to the group. Technician can also change group for given ticket. On top of that, you can also achieve through automation.
"Can our client create user groups themselves?"
Not at release of this feature. We do have plan to introduce it in the future. Current plan is to allow contact with all tickets permission to be able to create user group, edit group name or group icon.
"Is user group able to integrate with ConnectWise site?"
Yes. ConnectWise site can exist as one of virtual group, similar to all tickets, my tickets. User need ConnectWise site permission.
"Are we able to give ConnectWise site access per company instead of contact?"
A: Yes you can, under company's permissions tab, you can add site access. This is only available for ConnectWise.
"Will site approver works if I enable site access for whole company?" (ConnectWise)
No. since release of user group, site approver feature now moved to limited support. We will keep functionality as long as possible but it is not recommended. Site approver only works for contact who has permission enabled, not company level permission.
"I have updated ConnectWise site's name, but user's client portal still displaying old name."
DeskDirector is using cached data to populate site name. In the future we will look into resolution.
"I am currently using Group tags. Is there a way I can convert these into user groups?"
Yes, we will provide a way for you to easily migrate and convert these group tags into user groups. This way, once everyone has moved to User Groups, we can deprecate group tags.
