What are groups in PlusPlus?
You can use groups in PlusPlus to filter people to assign content to, control access to content, and evaluate user engagement based on groups. A robust catalog offers content that targets specific groups of people, like manager training tracks that do not apply to individual contributors or events for engineers that do not apply to salespeople.
What are public and private groups?
Public and private groups offer different levels of visibility and security, allowing for more flexible content management and access control within an organization.
What is a Group Owners in PlusPlus
Before we delve into more about public and private groups let's review all the roles and explain what a"group owner." is.
Group owners are users with special permissions and responsibilities within the PlusPlus platform. They play a crucial role in managing and organizing groups, which are used to categorize users and control access to content. More on group owners below.
Note that even if your a platform organizer and are not an owner of a group you will not have access to view or edit the group
There are two types of group owners
regular users who have been added to a group as an owner, like Charlie below, however as his user role is regular and not admin/organizer he cannot access the Groups Dashboard and manage this group and either an admin/organizer is required to edit or manage his group or paste the URL to their group
The other type of group owner is one who has an elevated role above "regular" (admin/organizer) and has access to all the dashboards, including the Groups dashboard, and can manage all groups
PlusPlus Roles defined
System Administrators/Admin
System (or global) Admins have the highest level of access and control within the PlusPlus platform. Their responsibilities include:
Managing the entire PlusPlus instance
Creating and managing all types of groups
Assigning roles to other users, including group owners and system organizers
Overseeing platform-wide settings and configurations
Generating comprehensive reports across all aspects of the system
Access to all areas of the system expect for the Super Admin menu in global settings reserved for only PlusPlus administrators
PlusPlus System Organizer
System Organizers, different than content organizers, have elevated permissions just below an admin but duties are more focused on content and group organization. Their role includes:
Managing the content structure of the PlusPlus system
Creating and overseeing groups
Assigning group owners
Generating reports from all content and from all the dashboards
Overseeing content organization and access across the platform
This role does not have access to platform global settings
Regular Users
Regular Users have basic access to the PlusPlus platform. Their capabilities include:
Viewing and interacting with content they have access to
Participating in groups they are members of
Cannot create or manage groups
Cannot perform administrative tasks
Cannot access dashboards or edit content unless they've been specifically assigned as a content item Facilitator: Organizer, Co-Organizer, Presenter, Maintainer, Curator
Note, that even if Charlie is a group owner that is assigned to a content item he cannot access or edit the content unless he's one of the facilitators.
Content Owner (Regular User)
This is a specific type of Regular User who also owns content. If you are a facilitator in any capacity we consider you a content owner. Regular user content owners (Facilitator: Organizer, Co-Organizer, Presenter, Maintainer, Curator) have the limitations of a regular user with a few additional capabilities:
Creating and managing their own content
Assigning their content to public groups
Filtering assignment data on their content based on groups
Cannot create or manage groups directly
These users need to be added to content by a platform Admin or Organizer or a content owner in order to utilize a the content owner role, which are one of these:
Content item Facilitator
Content item Organizer or Co-Organizer
Content item Maintainer
Content Presenters
Presenter's in PlusPlus can manage:
Events: They can facilitate or host live engagement events
Office Hours: Content presenters can host office hour sessions
Mentorship Sessions: They can host mentorship sessions as mentors
This hierarchy of roles allows for flexible management of content, groups, and overall system organization within the PlusPlus platform, catering to different levels of responsibility and access needs.
Public and private group key details
Group visibility
Always determine if the group should be public or private based on access and visibility where both groups can only be managed by platform admin and organizer role holding users
Public groups are visible to all platform admins, organizers, content owners, even non-group owners (not regular users) but not editable by non group owners
Private groups are are visible and editable to all platform admins, organizers, and content owners if they own the group (not regular users). Private groups can be seen but their group names are obfuscated
Understand limitations and user capabilities for public groups
System admins/organizers can assign content to public and private groups, however, regular users do not have access to the Groups Dashboard or the ability to add to or edit groups.
Access restrictions to content and Channels can be applied based on groups.
There are robust filtering capabilities to only display public or private groups, groups with or without associate content, group owners, and more.
By clicking on the group name in the far left column you are linked to group details which now display all the content the group is apart of.
Example of content tied to the People Managers group
Additional functionalities
System admins/organizers are able to pull an assignment report for any group from the Assignment Dashboard
A content owner with a regular user role would be able to filter assignment data on their content based on only that group.
Typical steps for using groups in PlusPlus.
Create a group.
In this step you determine who is in the group, who owns/manages it, and whether it is private or public. You can do this manually or automatically via integration.Assign content to a group.
In this step you access content and assign it to groups from there. For more, see How to assign content to a group.Manage/update group membership and details as needed.
You can only edit manually-created groups within the application. To edit groups created via integration, you have to use an external data source.
Go deeper
Should I create groups manually or automatically via integration?
The benefit of creating groups via integration is that it allows the system to automatically create and manage groups for you. This includes leveraging the platform's ability to build automated rules that automatically add new org members to appropriate groups.
The benefit of creating groups manually is that you can designate a group owner from the outset and you can return to groups from within the application to update membership, neither of which is possible with groups created via integration.
Groups managed via automated rules depend on broad organizational attributes, such as titles, departments, locations, tenure, manager, and such. They are great at covering broad populations of people. Manually-managed groups are better at targeting individuals.
For more on this topic, see How to manually create groups and/or How to automatically create and manage groups via integration.
Hiding content versus using groups
You can designate content items as hidden, which makes them visible only to users with elevated access (admins, content owners, and so on) while also granting access to anyone with the content item’s URL. We recommend setting content to hidden when you’re in the process of building it and don’t want it available to the whole org yet. Because you can share hidden content directly via URL, hiding content is also an easy way to manage one-off content that should only be viewed by a smaller number of people.
With groups, you can make content items visible and accessible only to people in certain groups. Groups are thus the longer-term, more sustainable solution for access control.
For more on this, see PlusPlus 101: Control access to content.
Groups v. segments
While groups are used to organize users for content distribution and provide an access control tool, segments are used in reports to save sets of filters. For more, see How to use segments in reports.
See also