How to organize groups in iOfficeV4

The structure of an organization is expressed in iOfficeV4 using the concept of group. The concept of group in iOfficeV4 is very simple, but flexible to express complicated organizations. Although the groups are physically structured with a single layer, it can express the organization which has a complicated hierarchy.

For example, assume the following virtual organization.

Register groups

Add all the groups to the Group List. You do not need to take the hierarchy into consideration, but the order should follow the above figure.

To add groups, see Managing groups.

After the registration, the group list should be like this.

Use an abbreviation name if a group name is too long.

Register users

So far nothing special, little tips are needed for registration of users.

All the staff belonging to the group which is under a group in the hierarchy should also be registered into the group as users.

To add users, see Managing users, and to make users belong to groups, see Managing groups.

Bold user names indicate that users' default groups.

In this way, each user and group was organized well.

For example, in the Schedule:

• The General Manager, Smith can see schedule of Davis and Stone who work under him, and his secretary, Parker.

• The secretary of Smith, Parker can schedule a division meeting. She can use the Find Free Time tool to find a free time of Smith, Davis, and Stone. All she has to do is selecting the one group, "PC".

• Baker can see the schedule of his coworker, Carter. He also can see schedule of his boss, Davis, by selecting the group, PC-Sales. If he prefers to see schedule of all members of PC-Sales, he can choose PC-Sale as the initial displaying group.

Using the Title Code

We finished organizing the group structure by use of the above procedure. However we have not considered about the display order of staff yet. The display order of users in each application's screen may be important. In the above example, Smith should be displayed in the top of a list.

The users registered will be displayed in the lists according to the order of the addition. Although the administrator can move user's position manually, iOfficeV4 provides much smarter way to do it.

To create the Title Code:

Since a title code expresses his/her position, the coding rules of the Title Code should be determined in the same manner of grouping users.

We use the above virtual organization again.

First of all, assign codes to group.

Note:

This explains the process of the code creation. There is no function to actually assign a code to a group.

As you see, it is quite logical. Note that the code has not begun from 000, and also the next code of 100 is 200 instead of 101. In future, you may need to place divisions, departments, or sections to anywhere. Therefore you have to make space for them.

The next is to assign the code to users.

Now we finished to create the Title Code.

To set the Title Code to users, see Managing users.

After the setting the Title Code is done, you should sort the user list by use of Sort Display Order by Title function. Since this function sorts the list group by group, you should do it for all lists of group including "(All)" list.

To grant the access rights to users:

Finally, we grant the access rights to the users. Unless we do this, any user can access any users' information or data even if the users are grouping. The information access policy should be determined by your organization.

See Understanding iOfficeV4 security policies for more detail about the access rights.

This is an example for Schedule, grant the access rights of the schedule of each user to other users.

iOfficeV4 grants access rights in the following manner.

User grants access rights of objects to users.

User is either an administrator or a user.

Access rights are Read, Add, Edit, or, and Delete.

Objects are data, folder, or schedule. It depends on applications.

Users are iOfficeV4 users.

For PC:

1. Choose the group, PC from Group List (who grant) to select all the users in the group except Parker. The users who grant access rights were selected. In this explanation, they are Smith, Davis, and Stone.

2. Choose the group, PC from Group List (grant to whom) to select the group. The group, PC which is granted the access rights of Schedule of the selected users is selected. Note that we select a group instead of users.

3. Grant Read access rights to the group, PC.

4. Choose the group, PC from Group List (grant to whom) to select the group, and choose the users, Smith and Parker from the group. Smith and Parker who are granted the access rights of Schedule of the selected users are selected.

5. Grant Add access rights to Smith and Parker.

For Parker:

1. Choose the group, PC from Group List (who grant) to select Parker. The user who grant access rights were selected. In this explanation, it is Parker.

2. Choose the group, PC from Group List (grant to whom) to select the group, and choose the users, Smith from the group. Smith who is granted the access rights of Schedule of the selected user is selected.

3. Grant Read, Add access rights to Smith.

For PC-Sales:

1. Choose the group, PC-Sales from Group List (who grant) to select all users in the group. The users who grant access rights were selected. In this explanation, they are Davis, Barker, Carter, Cooper, and Fisher.

2. Choose the group, PC-Sales from Group List (grant to whom) to select the group. The group, PC-Sales which is granted the access rights of Schedule of the selected users is selected. Note that we select a group instead of users.

3. Grant Read access rights to the group, PC-Sales.

4. Choose group, PC-Sales from Group List (grant to whom) to select the group, and choose the user, Davis from the group. Davis who is granted the access rights of Schedule of the selected users is selected.

5. Grant Add access rights to Davis.

For PC-Sales-Foreign:

1. Choose the group, PC-Sales-Foreign from Group List (who grant) to select all users in the group. The users who grant access rights were selected. In this explanation, they are Barker, Carter.

2. Choose the group, PC-Sales-Foreign from Group List (grant to whom) to select the group. The group, PC-Sales-Foreign which is granted the access rights of Schedule of the selected users is selected. Note that we select a group instead of users.

3. Grant Read and Add access rights to the group, PC-Sales-Foreign.

(The explanation leaves other groups out.)

As the result of the operation,

• Smith and Parker can see and add events to schedule of Smith, Parker, Davis, and Stone.

• Davis can see the schedule of Smith, Stone, Backer, Carter, Cooper, and Fisher, and can add events to the schedule of Backer, Carter, Cooper, and Fisher.

• Backer can see the schedule of Davis, Backer, Carter, Cooper, and Fisher, and can add events to schedule of Carter.

• A user can read, add, edit, and delete events to/of his/her schedule, and can read, edit, and delete the event to which he/she added by him/herself.

In Step 2 of each procedure of the above explanation, we do not select users because when someone joins a group he/her is automatically granted the access rights to which the group was granted.