Managing User Groups 6.12+

Your organisation will have set up Symplectic Elements with a suitable structure of groups and sub-groups. However, it is likely that new groups will need to be created, and that your organisation may undergo a change in structure from time to time. This page will show you how to set up and manage the user groups for your organisation.

The User Groups functionality in Elements allows administrators to manage many aspects of the institution’s users and records:

• Specific module settings for each Primary Group.

• Allow staff members to take responsibility for managing publications for different groups as group Administrators.

• Use the reporting and statistics tools to compare groups of users.

The Manage groups page [System admin > Users & groups > Group management > Manage groups] will show the existing groups in your organisation:

The top level group ("Organisation" by default - "Lilliput University" in this example) contains all users in the system. All other groups are arranged hierarchically in a tree below the top level group. Some of these groups will be Primary Groups, others may be Auto Groups populated automatically according to filters that select members using HR data from the feed. Other groups further down the hierarchy may be Manual Groups populated to include particular individuals.

You can search for a group anywhere in the tree by entering a keyword at the top of the screen.

To view and change the details and settings for an existing group, click on its name in the tree and you will be taken the 'Group details' page. 

You can change the group name and description in the 'overview' section. The action buttons at the top right allow you to label groups, email all members of the group, and download all group members. Additional menu options for primary groups include; configuring notification emails, reminder emails, help page content, default search settings and default data source availability. It is also possible to create a child group of this group and delete the group.

The 'Group record' section allows you to capture additional metadata associated with the group. The 'Related groups' section displays all ancestors and sub-groups. On the right-hand side, you can see information about the membership modal, the roles that target the group and any history events associated with the group. 

New groups must be created as a child-group of an existing group. To create a new group you should first select the group that you intend to be the ‘parent’. From the 'three-dot' menu on 'Group details' page, you can choose to 'Create child group'.

The first choice to make when you create a new group is to determine the membership model of the group you want to create. There are three group membership models:

• Primary Group: Automatically populated from HR data; customisable for unique user experience; users can only be an explicit member of one and only one primary group. 

• Auto Group: Automatically populated by an expression querying HR data.

• Manual Group: Manually populated.

Note: the User Group membership model cannot be changed after the group has been created.

Note: the User Group membership model was called User Group "Type" in versions prior to 6.11.

All groups have a stock set of underlying fields that can be completed when you create the group, or edited at a later stage. This set of underlying fields can be modified to suit your specific organisational requirements.

Ensure the 'Membership model' is set to ‘Primary’ and select from the list of Primary group descriptors. This drop-down menu is populated automatically by Elements from the data received in the user feed.

The group will be populated automatically, with users matching the Primary Group descriptor supplied in the HR feed.

You can set up a Primary Group ready to receive new members in advance of the new descriptor appearing in the HR feed. If so, type the name as it will appear in the feed into the box. Once the new descriptor appears in the records, the group will begin to be populated.

An Auto Group is populated by the system using a logical expression to select group members from the whole set of users in the system.

As an example, to create ‘All academics’ as an auto subgroup to ‘Digital Science’ (a primary group), select the ‘Digital Science’ primary group and from the 'three-dot' menu on 'Group details' page, you can choose to 'Create child group'. Select ‘Auto’ from the ‘membership model’ menu and a field requesting a suitable ‘WHERE’ clause will appear.

You will need to write a logical expression that selects the correct members of your user group and enter this into the ‘WHERE clause’ field (do not include the WHERE keyword in this field). You can use any data field from your HR data to create your query:

• Title

• Initials

• FirstName

• LastName

• KnownAs

• Suffix

• Email

• AuthenticatingAuthority

• Username

• Proprietary_ID

• PrimaryGroupDescriptor

• Generic01 - Generic50

• IsAcademic

• [Current]

• LoginAllowed

• IsStudent

• ArriveDate

• LeaveDate

• Position

• Department

• PublicUrlPathFragment

The following privacy-related fields are not available since they are not stored in the user table and may otherwise lead to confusing results, as the actual privacy settings are determined by a number of factors:

• IsPublic

• InstitutionalEmailIsPublic

Note: [Current] requires square brackets to distinguish it from the SQL keyword CURRENT. You can also include queries like [CreatedWhen]>'2018-01-01' if you know the field name in the database.

In our example, the following WHERE clause is suitable

Generic02 = 'Research Data Centre'

This will automatically populate the group with all users for whom the organisation specific field Generic02 contains the value "Research Data Centre".

If you wish to review the data contained in the user table (above), this information can be obtained by downloading all users in CSV/Excel format under System admin > User & groups > User management > Manage users and user feed.

Note: Even if more user-friendly names for your organisation-specific fields have been set you should still use the generic names ‘Generic01’, ‘Generic02’ etc. in the WHERE clause.

You can create more complex WHERE clauses using Boolean operators such as OR to collect data from multiple Generic Fields. For example, your institution's Center for Forest Business may be entered in more than one generic field. To bring all these users together into a single auto group, use the WHERE clause

Generic19 = 'Center for Forest Business' OR Generic20 = 'Center for Forest Business' OR Generic21 = 'Center for Forest Business'.

After entering your clause, click on Add and you will be taken to a new ‘group settings’ screen. The system will select a set of members according to your criteria and show the number of members resulting from this on the new screen.

You can inspect the membership by clicking on the number. If needed, you can then adjust the logical expression and click on ‘save’ to re-create the membership list.

Manual groups can also be created. Members of these groups are added one by one, rather than using a logical expression to filter the user table. These groups will not have their membership updated automatically, and will need to be maintained regularly by Administrators.

Alternatively, manual groups need not explicitly contain any members at all, but instead serve as group ‘containers’ to organise and separate out other user groups.

Note: Membership of groups passes ‘upwards’ through the organisation. Therefore, any members added to a sub-group will also, by definition, become members of the groups above them in the tree. This is particularly important to remember when creating auto groups because these will use the whole set of users from the HR feed to select members. The potential membership of your auto group is not limited to the members of the parent group. Therefore, if you accidentally enter criteria for an auto group which are very wide, you could add a very large number of new users to its parent group as well.

To add new members to a manual group, type their surnames into the box one by one, select the correct user from the drop-down list, and then click on the ‘add’ button.

To remove a member, click on the cross next to their name.

For new or existing User Groups, you can assign roles to members of staff to enable administrative tools.

Administrators can:

• edit membership of the group

• change the group settings

• create new administrators and assign other roles

• change module settings for the group (only for Primary Groups)

• impersonate all members of the group

• send reminder emails

Statisticians can:

• view statistical reports for the members of the group (and sub-groups)

Research Managers can:

• impersonate all members of the group

• send reminder emails while impersonating users

These roles will cascade through the groups in the system, so an administrator for a group will also be an administrator for all the sub-groups under it.

Please see Roles in Elements for further details.

System Administrators and Administrators for Primary Groups can change module settings. To make changes to settings that will only apply to members of a Primary Group, access the options via the menu option at the top-right of the page.

Note: Only module settings that have not been overridden at a module level will be available for configuration. See Overriding Module Settings for further details.

Changes made in this way will not affect the members of other groups.

Note that System Administrators and Group Administrators for Primary Groups also have the ability to edit the settings for a Primary Group, and can select to override module settings that have been created this way. If your institution decides to do this, these changes will not be possible for Primary Groups, and any existing local settings will be removed.