Difference between revisions of "Users, groups and permissions"

Revision as of 13:09, 22 December 2009

Setting up your Group-Office environment starts with setting up users, groups and permissions. This page will give you an example of what we think is the perfect Group-Office setup for companies that want to take full advantage of all Group-Office features for office use.

The administrator account

It's important that you use this account only for administrative purposes. We strongly advise you not to use this account as a regular user for safety and usability reasons. Basically use the administrator account only for:

1. Adding and editing user accounts
2. Adding and editing user groups
3. Installing/removing modules
4. Creating items that are commonly used for more users such as a global addressbook, shared calendars or a corporate HTML template for outgoing e-mail messages.

   It's very important that you do this as an administrator so you will avoid the following scenario

   User 1 creates an addressbook and projects. This user shares these items with everybody. Everybody uses those items. Now User 1 no longer works at your company. Time to remove the user account. Oops! The

   projects and his addressbook are gone too!

Create user groups

First create user groups for your company. Permissions are much easier to handle with groups then with individual users. When you grant the secretary access to all calendars as a user it will be a painful job to reset all permissions to another user when a new secretary joins the company. If you had done it with a group you could simply add the new employee to the secretary user group. So choose your groups wise with user permissions in mind. For example create:

1. A secretary group called "Secretary"
2. A group for the engineers called "Engineering"

A few special groups are created by default:

1. Admins, users of this group will have permission to everything. Usually you don't want to add any user to this group. See above.
2. Everyone, all users are in this group. Use carefully when granting permissions to this group.
3. Internal, this group is created by default and new users are commonly added to this group by default. It should contain all company users and not your customers

Create users

Now that we've got the groups set up it's time to add the users. You can do this at:

Start menu -> Users -> Add

Fill in the profile fields. Mandatory are First name, Last name, Username, Password and e-mail.

Also pay attention to the "Permissions" tab. Remember that the default permissions can be set by the system administrator in the main configuration file (config.php). You can also give user groups access to particular modules. This way you can manage module access easier. You'll just have to add the new user to the right group. When a user has access to a module by a user group, the access checkbox will be greyed out. In most cases you should give users only "Usage" access to modules. The difference between Usage and Manage permissions on module are described in the table below:

Make sure you setup the right regional settings for the users. The timezone is particularly important because events will shift if you change this setting later on.