Why use 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. You can use groups in PlusPlus to filter people to assign content to, control access to content, and evaluate user engagement based on groups.

Solution

Here are the 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.