Manage / Groups |
When you create or modify a group, you specify values for properties that control the way the group behaves and the way users interact with it.
Groups provide a way to notify or address multiple users at once ("Send a message to Nurses Assistants"), or to call someone who fits a specific role ("Call a salesperson"), or has some other skill or authority that the caller requires (Call a manager).
The following list summarizes the properties available in Vocera groups:
Identification properties specify the group name and contact information.
Membership properties define the set of users who are members in a group and the order in which Vocera routes calls to them when round-robin scheduling option is specified.
Group Type properties determine whether a group is used as a department or a subdepartment, and optionally specify a telephony PIN or Cost Center ID for accounting purposes.
Roles properties determine which roles are assigned to a group. Roles are directly linked to a policy with one or more policy items, and policy items are permissions to control user access. See Understanding Groups, Roles, and Policies for more information.
Call Forwarding properties determine the flow of calls from one group to another, potentially through your entire organization.
Voice Permissions determine the ability of users to issue certain voice commands or perform specific operations.
Speech Recognition properties specify the names that users can speak to call a group and the names that the Genie can use to prompt users.
Conference properties determine which users are in an instant "push-to-talk" conference that simulates the behavior of a walkie-talkie.
Emergency Broadcast properties determine which group members receive an emergency broadcast message in the event of an emergency.
In some situations, it is useful to include a group as a member of another group. For example, in a health care environment, you may want the Nurse group to include the Head Nurse and Charge Nurse groups. In this example, Head Nurse and Charge Nurse are nested groups.
The voice permissions that you specify for a group flow down to the members of any nested groups. For example, if the Communications group is nested within the Marketing group, the members of Communications inherit the permissions that you specify for Marketing unless you revoke specific permission for Communications.
While it is often beneficial to nest groups to establish permissions and call flows, it is usually better to avoid nesting groups that are used as departments.