User groups ease up the administration and management of your organization within Flip.
In this article you find all fundamentals to take full advantage of user groups.

What is the value of user groups?

User groups simplify administrative tasks of setting up and maintaining an organisation and its underlying units, and therefore reducing time and errors.

The goal is to give each employee exactly the information and access they need. Features like channels and menu items are therefore designed to reach a specific subset of users for which the content is relevant. With user groups, this subset can be managed once and used across all those features. For example, with menu items based on user groups, you can define specific items for each department depending on its needs.

Furthermore, user groups can be used to create a distributed administration for your app by allowing certain users to manage different user groups and subgroups. For example, locations and factories can manage their channels by themselves, reducing time and communication overhead.

What is a user group?

A user group represents an organizational unit of your company such as a location, department, team or a legal entity. Each user group can have multiple sub user groups allowing a fine-grained mapping of your organization. The most common structure is the hierarchical structure of departments and teams of an organization, but more customized structures can be created.

User group members

Users can be assigned to one or multiple user groups. Allowing users to be part of multiple user groups enables the modelling of more complex structures, like temporary project teams.

Assigning a user to a user group may lead to a different experience for this user, depending on the configuration and used features. With the features based on user groups, the user:

• can view new channels based on user groups → More information
• has access to new menu items based on user groups →
• has a whole new branding with a new logo and colors based on its primary user group

User group roles & permissions

Roles are sets of permission grouped together so that they can be attached to a user in a specific scope. In the scope of user groups, there are the following roles with their respective sets of permissions.

Owner Role

Users with this role can:

• View and manage all primary assigned users of the user group and all sub groups of it
• View and manage the user group itself and all sub groups of it
• View and edit the branding for the user group and all sub groups of it
• View and manage channels for the user group and all sub groups of it
• View and manage menu items for the user group and all sub groups of it

Member Role

This is the default assignment of a user to a user group. Depending on the used features like channels, menu items or branding, the member of a user group has view rights to those and may experience the app differently based on the feature specific settings. The member does not have any administration rights on the user group.

One user can have multiple roles and consequently multiple sets of permissions from these roles. The permissions of multiple roles assigned to a user add up to all permissions the user effectively has.

As an example: Being the owner of a user group does not mean the user is also a member of the same user group and therefore does not have all the permissions (eg. viewing channels in the app).

Primary assignment

Each user must have a primary assignment to exactly one user group. This single primary user group is used to determine

1. who can administrate and manage a specific user.
2. the setting of features which has to come from exactly one user group (like the branding based on user groups)

In most cases, the primary assignments to user groups represent the hierarchical organization chart.

Default user groups

When first starting with user groups, there are two predefined user groups:

Root

This user group is the root for all other user groups. It is named after the organization.

All Users

"All Users" is the default user group for all users and is used

1. anytime no user group is specified for a user
2. as fallback for users of which the primary user group assignment was deleted
3. as fallback for users of which the primary user group was archived

At any time, every user of an organization is permanently assigned to this user group.

Because this is a fallback user group, it is not recommended to use it as a parent user group.