Users, Groups, and Permissions / Working with Groups and Departments |
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:
Identification properties specify the group name and contact information.
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.
Scheduling properties specify how calls are routed to members when users call a group.
Department properties determine whether a group is used as a department, and optionally specify a telephony PIN or Cost Center ID for accounting purposes.
Membership properties define the set of users who are members in a group and the order in which Vocera routes calls to them, if you specify the round robin scheduling option.
Forwarding properties determine the flow of calls from one group to another, potentially through your entire organization.
Permissions determine the ability of users to issue certain commands or perform specific operations.
Conference properties determine which users are in an instant “push-to-talk” conference that simulates the behavior of a walkie-talkie.
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.