Managing Departments, User Types, and Permission Groups

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to create Departments, User Types, and Permission Groups in Advanced Workflow.

Departments and User Types

In Advanced Workflow, every user must be assigned a Department and a User Type.

The Department field denotes the department or team to which each user belongs. They are used in a number of ways, such as granting access to notification groups, visibility permissions, companies, and other objects. Examples of departments include Sales, Human Resources, or Finance.

When creating a department, you can select a Gate Keeper and Company. A Gate Keeper can be an individual user or a role that can be used in workflow assignment rules to assign actions or receive notifications. A company is just like it sounds; the name of the company to which the user belongs. This is not a required field, but is useful if the system is supporting multiple companies; for example, in the case of a parent/subsidiary.

Department Visibility Permissions and Details

The Visibility Permissions section of the Department record allows you to select which Permission Groups and Roles can be viewed by members of this department.

The Permission Details section allows you to assign the Department to a Permission Group.

The User Type field defines characteristics for similar users. User types enable you to organize your users. User types can represent users from the same functional area, or they can be a group of users with the same role within a company. Some examples of user types include Customers, Partners, or Managers.

The image below shows the relationship between companies, departments, and user types. Notice that a department can only belong to a single company, but a department can include users with different User Types.

Diagram showing Company A and B with departments, categorized users (Type A, B, C), and user assignments within each department.

Once you have configured a list of Departments and User Types, you can assign them to users in several ways:

  • In the Incentive Management Portal, open Global Settings and set a default Department and User Type in the Workflow Settings pane
  • Add the Department and User Type directly in the User record
  • Create a custom script to assign the Department and User Type based on predefined criteria

Permission Groups

A Permission Group is used to define access rights. Once you have created a Permission Group, you can control who will belong to the Permission Group by assigning it to Departments, User Types, or individual users.

Create Departments and User Types

In this exercise, you will create departments and user types, and assign users to their respective departments and user types.

ExerciseStart Exercise

Steps

  1. Create a department called Inquiries.

    1. From the Users menu, select Departments.

    2. Select Add New.

    3. Enter the following information:

      • Name: Inquiries

      • Company: Intellasoft

        Form for adding a new department with fields for name, system ID, company, and visibility permissions in SAP software.

  2. Repeat this step to add a second department called Workflow Administration.

  3. Create two user types called Inquiries Manager and Inquiries Administrator.

    1. From the Users menu, select User Types.

    2. Select Add New.

    3. Enter the name: Inquiries Manager.

    4. Select Save.

    5. Repeat this step to add a second User Type called Inquiries Administrator.

Assign Users to User Types and Departments

Since the users are replicated from Incentive Management, we do not need to create users in Advanced Workflow. However, to ensure that each user has the right permissions, we will assign existing users to User Types and Departments using the table below.

User NameDepartmentUser Type
Paula WolfInquiriesInquiries Manager
Beverly BassInquiriesInquiries Administrator
Amy WhittonSalesInternal User
Terry CallahanSalesInternal User
ExerciseStart Exercise

Steps

  1. Add Paula Wolf to the Inquiries department and the Inquiries Manager user type.

    1. From the Setup screen, select Users→Users.

    2. Find the User record for Paula Wolf.

    3. Select Edit.

    4. In the Department field, select Inquiries.

    5. In the User Type field, select Inquiries Manager.

    6. Select Update.

    7. Repeat these steps to assign the rest of the users to departments and user types using the values in the table above.

Create Permission Groups

In this exercise, you will create three Permission Groups. The first will be Inquiry Submitters, and will be used to grant access to members of the Sales Department. The next will be Inquiry Admins, and will be used to grant access to users with the Inquiries Administrator user type. The third will be Inquiry Managers, and will be used to grant access to users with the Inquiries Manager user type.

ExerciseStart Exercise

Steps

  1. Create a Permission Group called Inquiry Submitters.

    1. From the Users menu, select Permission Groups.

    2. Select Add New.

    3. Enter the following information:

      • Name: Inquiry Submitters
      • Department: Sales
      • User Type: Internal Users
      • Select Save.

  2. Using the same steps as in Step 1, create the rest of the permission groups using the information in the table below.

    Permission Group NameDepartmentUser Type
    Inquiry SubmittersSalesInternal User
    Inquiry ManagersInquiriesInquiries Manager
    Inquiry AdminsInquiriesInquiries Administrator

Summary

  • Administrator roles are assigned via a checkbox within user profiles.
  • Every user must have a department and a user type.
  • Departments can be used to grant access to notification groups, visibility permissions, companies, and other objects.
  • User Types define characteristics for similar users and enable you to organize your users.

Learning

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