From the Q&A Vault…What’s the difference between Groups and Roles?

A Group is set up at the Community Level and includes a set of members from the Community List.  For example, Human Resources or Project Alpha Team or IT Managers.  A group can be added as a member to an eRoom and assigned a role like Participant or Observer.  It can also be seen in any member lists in the eRoom.  For example, I can assign a task to “IT Managers” or I can set up a private folder that only allows “Human Resources” to access it.  A group can be added to one or more eRooms, and the membership of that group is controlled by Community Admins only.

A Custom Role is another type of member grouping, but only applies to an individual eRoom.  For example, for an eRoom that is used to publish books, I might have a Role called “Tech Writers” that is used to permit the technical writers access to some documents but not others.  Because it’s a specific need for this eRoom, I would not create it at the community level.  Custom Roles appear in all Member List dialog boxes, so if I want to assign the Tech Writer group to my weekly staff meeting, or assign them a task, I can do that.

By using groups and roles to apply access control, you save a lot of administrative time and strengthen your security measures in the eRoom.  Using Groups and Roles has long been one of our standing best practice recommendations, and I’m sure many Admins and Users can attest to its usefulness.

We had 33 users attend our first eRug Meeting on January 15, 2008.  (Not bad–we thought 20 to 25 would be a good start).  Thanks to Elaine Nearing and Rod Largoza from Wyeth for their help in planning and presenting.  There were two primary topics we discussed:

eRoom Governance, Procurement Process.  Elaine and Rod talked about Wyeth handled their internal process for requesting new eRooms.  They have a fairly sophisticated process because of the volume of eRooms they handle, and they use a custom-built form to log, process, and fulfill requests.  Here’s a thumbnail view (click for a larger image, or get the full size image from the presentation file below):

A Strategic Approach to eRoom Training. I presented from a consultant’s “best practice” view an approach for training eRoom users.  These were the “Guiding Principles” for approaching training:

• Include Best Practices and applicable operational policies, and match content to audience
• Focus on Coordinators
• “Build” training into eRooms with good design
• Identify and deliver to all users the “Essentials”
• Provide JIT, focused training to jumpstart new groups

Rather than republish all the information from the presentation, I’ve provided a short summary of the main topics and attached the slides here for further details.  We are NOT posting the entire recorded conversation, just the slide deck (in PDF format).  Let me know if there any questions on it.

eRug User Group 1/15/08 Meeting Presentation