Creating school groups

In order to be able to assign people only the information they need we use groups. With school districts we set up a group for each school. We may also want some other groups such as transportation if there will be a lot of lists in a single department. As part of the setup each school group should be created so that parents, students and staff lists for each school can be made and access granted to users at each building. "District Office" users will have access to all users and groups automatically.

How to create a group

Groups can only be created from the main login. Users can be added to that main group, another group, or set up as individuals but only the 1 login can add new users or create new groups.

Click on the menu in the upper left corner
Select User accounts
This will take you to the User Accounts page. The main account group will be the first row and all the other groups will follow that. After the groups will be the individuals who may also be members of each group. To add a new group click Add User
Enter your new group (school) information. Because we need to be able to automatically add users to the appropriate groups we will need a pattern on the group login name.
Tip: Open the /admin/schools/home.html page in a separate tab or window and use the data in each school record to populate rather than typing. You can get the school name (group name), school abbreviation (for the login), and school phone (outbound caller id) from that page.
1. Leave the Group Name toggle checked and fill in the name
2. Group Login Name: Login names must be unique. Even though no one will login as this group directly it must be unique. For schools we need there to be a common pattern. Something like SpringfieldNY_ at the front of each one followed by the school abbreviation as it is entered in PowerSchool.
  1. It is critical that you do not guess at the school abbreviation, it must match what is in PowerSchool for the other parts to work
3. Password: A required field, feel free to just hit keys as no one will use it
4. Outbound Caller ID: Enter a default phone number for outbound voice messages. This number will be the default caller ID for new lists created by this group. Generally this is the school's main office phone number.
5. Default Email Address: Enter a default email address for outbound email messages. This will serve as the default sending email for new lists created by this group
6. Check the 2nd checkbox and leave the first blank
7. Email Address for Password Recovery and Alerts: If a member of this group forgets their password and uses the "forgot my password" option but doesn't have their own email address listed as the recovery then who should get the recovery email?
8. In New Look:
9. In BrightView
Click OK
Repeat 3-5 for the other schools

Using a group to separate lists

Over time the number of lists you have can grow and become a lot to look at. Sometimes you need to keep them just in case. You can use a group to separate them and hide/show them as needed.

Ex: A school district wants to have pre-made lists ready with their bus routes. There are 50 bus routes in the morning and again in the afternoon. Since the same route may have different riders in the morning than in the afternoon they'll need separate lists for a total of 100 bus route lists. Those 100 lists all show up in the main group along with the rest of the lists.

Instead, a new group can be made called transportation and the 100 lists can be put in that group. All the users who need access can be granted access to the transportation group so everyone who needs to see those lists can but they can also hide that group when they don't need to look at them. In all cases the 100 bus route lists don't clutter their day to day lists.