About Group Properties and Permissions

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 leave messages for many users at once (“Send a message to Nurses Assistants”), or to call someone who fits a specific role (“Call a sales person”), belongs to a certain department (“Call Accounts Receivable”), or has some other skill or authority that the caller requires (“Call a manager”).

The following list summarizes the properties available in Vocera groups:

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 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 receive the permissions that you specify for Marketing, unless you revoke a 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.