Getting started with Groups
A Group is a reusable set of people that you build once and then select as a whole, so one choice covers everyone in it. Change a Group's membership and every place it is used picks that change up on its own.
Where you can use a Group
You can use a Group in four places:
- Assignment rules in Events, to add its members as collaborators.
- Scheduled Audits, as the assignees.
- Document access, to grant view or edit access.
- Document acknowledgement requests, as the recipients.
For example:
- A safety lead sets up a rule so that every accident reported at the Manchester site is shared with the Manchester Safety Team, giving the right people access from the moment it is reported.
- A facilities manager assigns the monthly fire door inspection to the North Site Team, and the schedule keeps working when someone joins or leaves that team.
- A compliance lead grants the Safety Committee view access to a folder of risk assessments once, and new members of the committee get that access as they join.
- A health and safety manager sends the updated lone working policy to every field worker by adding one Group to the acknowledgement request, which covers all 300 of them.
What happens to someone's access and assignments when they join or leave depends on which of the four it is. See 'Where you can use a Group'.
Manual and dynamic Groups
Every Group is one of two types, and you can change the type later.
| Manual | Dynamic | |
|---|---|---|
| How membership is set | You add and remove people yourself | A rule you write, based on people's details |
| When it changes | Only when you change it | Automatically, as people's details change |
| Best for | Cohorts with no pattern, like a committee or a working party | Cohorts that follow the data, like everyone in a department, region, or site |
A dynamic Group's rule is built from the details held on each user record, for example department, site, job title, line manager, region, employment type, or country. If someone's department changes, they join or leave the Group on their own. See 'How to set up a dynamic Group with membership rules'.
If a dynamic Group doesn't contain who you expect, 'Why someone is missing from a dynamic Group' works through the usual causes.
Note: A Group is fully manual or fully dynamic. You can't hand-pick exceptions on top of a rule. If you need a cohort a rule can't describe, use a manual Group.
Who can access and manage Groups?
Groups are managed in 'Settings' > 'Organisation' > 'Groups', and only Account Owners can open that page.
| Your role | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Account Owner | Create, edit and deactivate Groups, manage members, and see which Groups any user belongs to |
| Manager | See the Groups you belong to on your own profile, read-only |
| User | See the Groups you belong to on your own profile, read-only |
If you're a Manager or a User, being in a Group still gives you everything that Group grants, you just can't change it. On your own profile, the 'Groups' tab lists each Group you belong to by name, labelled 'Manual' or 'Dynamic'.
What a Group does and doesn't do
- A Group only holds people from your own organisation, and each Group name must be unique.
- A Group grants access and assignments, it never removes them. If someone already has access another way, being outside the Group doesn't take it away.
- Deactivated users are hidden from a Group's member list and its member count, and they stop receiving anything the Group grants. Their membership is kept, so reactivating the account puts them back in their Groups.
- Deactivating a Group is reversible, but reactivating it doesn't put it back into the places it was used.
- Groups are available in Vatix Workspace on the web. They aren't shown in the mobile apps, though anything a Group grants you still applies there.
Related articles