A Tale of Two Cities (kind of). User Groups!

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

Lots of detail coming, so here’s the short story—you need a better way to filter data, not based on information within the record, but rather on who is responsible for or associated with the record. This is the scenario that we’re solving with User Groups.

Let’s talk through an example. Imagine a company that has two offices in two cities (get my Dicken’s reference now?). One is located on the East Coast; the other is located on the West Coast. Each office has local responsibilities for their own operational metrics, but these metrics also need to be rolled up to corporate.

Before User Groups, you’d write filters for three different reports, and create three different charts or views with your new filters. You’d create a filter to limit the data to just East Coast, another to limit to West Coast, and a third for Corporate, which would include data from both regions. As you can see from this simple use case, the filters (as well as the views & charts) necessary to segment your data could easily get out of control, which adds undue work to manage and creates a bunch of unneeded complexity.

With User Groups, you now have the ability to view this type of complex data using just one filter, and one view. Here’s how you do it.

User Groups
Create your User Groups. You can access the “User Group Manager” from the menu within the user manager. I’ve created an East Coast group and a West Coast group to use as an example.

Users
Next you just need to assign users to your groups. You do this from the user profile (also in user manager). Sticking with our example above, I’m part of the West Coast team, so I will only see West Coast-related records. Whereas my coworker, Todd, is at corporate, so he gets access to both East and West coast records.

Records
From the table editor, add a user group field to your table (I called it “Location Group”), and then add the new user group field to a form.

Once you’ve done this, you can assign a record to the appropriate group(s). In this example, I’m going to add one of this example company’s blood transfusion machines to the West Coast group.

Filters
Putting it all together, we can now build our single filter using the “Location Group” field. I’m creating a very simple filter that will only show assets that are part of the current logged in users’ assigned groups.

So the next time Todd and I log into this app in TrackVia, we’ll only see those items that belong to the groups we belong to! My “West Coast” list is on top, Todd’s East & West Coast list is below.

We are really excited for you to try out our User Groups feature. If you’d like more detail on how to set up or leverage this new feature, please visit our support site at help.trackvia.com.