Working with Groups and Departments / About Groups and Departments |
Learn the features associated with department membership.
In Vocera, department membership determines the following features:
Inner circle membership.
How users can be referenced in voice commands.
PINs for telephony access.
The cost center ID.
The data set used by many of the reports created by the optional Vocera Report Server.
In general, departments provide the greatest benefit when you:
Do not nest department groups.
Vocera treats nested departments systematically, as explained below, but users who do not understand that system may perceive unexpected results.
For example, users may be uncertain about which Vocera department they are in, and which sets of people should show up in various reports created by the Vocera Report Server.
Make sure all users are assigned to a department.
Make sure departments are not too large or too small. Departments should have between 3 and 1000 members.
If you do need to create nested departments, Vocera determines department membership as follows:
Immediate members of a department group are always members of that department. This is true even when the department group is nested under another department group.
When a department group contains other subdepartment groups, the members of the nested subdepartment groups are members of the nearest department above them.
For example, suppose Pediatrics is a department group that contains the Pediatric Nurses group, and suppose Maddie Hall is an immediate member of Pediatric Nurses.
If Pediatric Nurses is a department group, Maddie is a member of the Pediatrics Nurses department but not the Pediatrics department.
If Pediatric Nurses is a sub-department group, Maddie is a member of the Pediatrics department.
If Pediatric Nurses is an ordinary subgroup, Maddie is not a member of the Pediatrics department.
Make sure you consider any unintentional side-effects if you create nested department groups.