Scopes and Groups

Scopes are how Qik organises your data and decides who can reach it. Groups are scopes that people can belong to, with named positions that can carry permissions.

What are scopes?

Every piece of content belongs to at least one scope, and permissions are always granted within particular scopes. Think of scopes as compartments or departments that organise your data and control who can see what. A record can be in several scopes at once.

Scope hierarchies

Scopes are arranged in a tree with parent and child scopes, usually mirroring your organisation's structure. For example:

• An international charity: Global → Australia → Sydney, Melbourne, and Global → New Zealand → Auckland
• A school: School → Junior School, Middle School, Senior School
• A company: Company → Engineering, Marketing, Sales, HR

Permissions cascade downward. Access granted in a parent scope automatically applies in all of its child scopes. To set a scope's parent, edit the scope and choose its Parent. Scopes can be moved to a new parent later.

What scopes control

• Content visibility: users only see content in scopes they have access to.
• Permissions: roles are granted within specific scopes through access passes. See Roles and Permissions.
• Content creation: new content is created in one or more scopes.
• Content type availability: some content types can be limited to particular scopes.

Scopes also have a Foreground Color and Background Color so they're easy to tell apart in lists.

Groups

A scope can act as a group. A group is a scope that people belong to, such as a team, a class or a department. On top of organising data, groups give you:

• Positions: named roles within the group, such as "Team Leader", "Coach" or "Member".
• Members: the profiles (or logins) placed in each position.
• Position permissions: roles attached to a position are granted to everyone in it, within that group.
• Joining and leaving: each position can allow people to join or leave it themselves.

Groups sit at the edges of your scope tree. A group can't be the parent of other scopes.

Managing groups

Open Groups in the sidebar. The Group Types panel lists each kind of group in your organisation and how many are active. From each row you can View All groups of that type or click New to create one. View All Groups lists every group.

Creating a group type

1. In Groups, click New Group Type.
2. Enter a Title (for example "Team"), a Plural ("Teams") and a Key, and choose the Scopes to store the group type in.
3. Save. Qik creates a content type based on scopes, with Treat as group turned on, so every scope of this type is a group.

Like any content type, you can add your own fields to a group type, such as a meeting day or a location. The group type also has a Use persona membership option. Turn it on when positions should mainly hold user logins rather than profiles.

You can also make any individual scope a group by turning on Act as a group when editing it.

Adding positions and members

1. Open the group and edit it.
2. On the Positions tab, click Add Position and give it a Position Title.
3. Optionally choose Roles for the position. Everyone in it gets these roles within this group.
4. Optionally turn on Allow Joining or Allow Leaving so people can join or leave the position themselves.
5. Click Add profiles (or Add Users if the group type uses persona membership) and pick the people.
6. Save.

People in a group's positions are added to the group's scope. Positions can be reordered by dragging, and members can be moved between positions or removed.

Three read-only flags on each group summarise its positions. Allow Joining and Allow Leaving are on when any position allows it. Has Position Permissions turns on by itself once a position has at least one role and at least one member.

Use cases

• Departments: a group per department, with positions such as Manager and Staff.
• Teams: sports teams or project teams such as "Under 12s" or "Executive Team", with a Coach or Lead position.
• Regions: geographic groupings for organisations with several sites.
• Classes: student groups at a school or training provider, with Teacher and Student positions.

Related

• User Access Control: how scopes, roles, access passes and positions fit together.
• Access Beyond Roles: access that comes from built-in rules rather than roles.
• Merging Tags and Scopes: combine duplicate scopes.

Example Use Cases

FAQs