Workgroups

About workgroups

Workgroups are used to control users' access to functions and configuration settings in a Planning Space tenant. Most of these functions are application-specific, while a few are common to all of the Planning Space applications.

The effects of belonging to a workgroup are determined by the roles that a workgroup is allowed to use. (See Roles.)

Three workgroups are created by default for a new tenant:

• Administrators: this workgroup has access to all functions and all configuration settings for the tenant. By default, only Administrators can create or manage the user accounts, workgroups and roles of the tenant (but these roles can also be assigned to new workgroups).
• Everyone: all users are automatically members of this workgroup. By modifying the roles which Everyone is assigned to, you can control which features of the Planning Space applications are made 'public' and available to all users.
• SecurityAdministrators: by default this does not have any user members. (The workgroup name can be modified, and the workgroup can be deleted if it is not needed.)

You can add or remove user accounts from membership of a workgroup using the Workgroups management interface. The workgroup memberships for a single user account can be edited in the Users management interface.

Access to Workgroups management

To access the Workgroups management screen in the Planning Space Web application: Click the Apps Grid menu button at the top left and select Security, then click the Workgroups button in the left-hand side menu (access is restricted to Administrator users).

You will see the names and descriptions of the existing workgroups for the tenant.

Workgroups display

The table of workgroups shows Name and Description columns.

Each column in the table has two buttons in the column header:

• Filter button : Use this to filter by search string, or by cell contents
• Options button (this button is only visible when the mouse is hovering over the column header)

Create a new workgroup

Click the New workgroup button to create a new workgroup.

In the General tab of the edit blade, type in a Name, Description, and optional Comments. Workgroup names can only contain alphanumeric characters, underscores (no spaces), and full stops; names can be up to 128 characters and must start with a letter. See below for the optional External Group and License Profile Workgroup settings.

Users tab: Use the tick boxes next to the user account names to set the initial user membership of the workgroup.

Roles tab: Set the roles that this workgroup is allowed or denied..

Click the Save button to create the new workgroup.

Copy a workgroup to a new workgroup

You can make a new workgroup as a copy of an existing workgroup by selecting one workgroup and clicking the Copy workgroup button. The new workgrooup is given the name '{NAME}_copy'. Edit the settings as required and click the Save button to store the new workgroup.

'External Group' setting

The External Group field is used in the configuration of automatic provisioning of tenant user accounts. See the Planning Space 20.4 Deployment Guide.

'License Profile Workgroup' setting

The License Profile Workgroup checkbox is used to mark a workgroup for use with License Profiles, which can be used to control and prioritize users' access to Planning Space product licenses. License profiles can only be managed by IPS Administrators. See the Planning Space 20.4 Deployment Guide.

Edit a workgroup

To edit the settings for an existing workgroup, click on a workgroup name to open the edit blade. For example:

The workgroup that is being edited will be highlighted in blue. Click the X button at the top right corner to close the edit blade.

General tab: Workgroup names can be changed at any time, except for the 'Administrators' and 'Everyone' workgroups. You can also edit the Description and Comments.

Users tab: Use the tick boxes next to the user account names to add or remove user members of the workgroup.

Roles tab: Modify which roles this workgroup is allowed or denied (see Roles).

There are two control buttons, which become activated when you have made an edit. Click the Save button to save the changes that you have made. Click the Discard changes button to undo any unsaved changes.

User membership editing

There are two functions to assist with user selections.

The Invert Selections button appears in the Users tab in the edit blade. Clicking this button performs an inversion between selected and unselected users; this is useful, for example, in the case of switching document permissions between a specified list of allowed users and a list of denied users.

The Copy user selections from other workgroups button can be used to set user membership based on the settings in other workgroups. Clicking the button opens another blade showing a list of workgroups. Select one or more workgroups; a list of user accounts will appear. The radio buttons Any or All mean that a user account will be selected only when it is a member of all of the selected workgroups (i.e., logical AND selection), or any (one or more) of the selected workgroups (i.e., logical OR selection). Click Use selected to select those user accounts in the Users blade; any existing selections will be overridden.

Assign entity-level permissions for a workgroup

It is possible to edit the entity-level permissions for hierachies (Dataflow) and regimes (Economics and Financials).

Click a workgroup name to open its edit blade, and select the Assign Permissions tab.

Delete a workgroup

To delete a workgroup: click a workgroup name and click the Delete button in the edit blade.

Then click Delete in the confirmation dialog.

'Export as CSV' workgroup data

Click the Export as CSV button to export a file that contains the details of all of the workgroups, and also the Allowed and Denied roles.

Note: The role names are prepended by the application name (e.g., 'PlanningSpace Dataflow-Manage Data'); the same role name may be used for more than one application.