How roles and teams work together

Roles and teams are two user elements in FootPrints that work together:

• Team—Users are organized in teams for assignment purposes.
• Role—Users are granted permissions on what they can do within their team and within the FootPrints Workspace via a user role.

For example, while the "Level 1 Support Team" may be made up of five users, one of those users might be the team leader and the other four are support technicians. All five users share the same "Level 1 Support Team", but the team leader can be assigned the "Team Leader" role and the other members can be assigned the "Technician" role. This distinction is illustrated in the following table:

Teams can be organized for different functions, departments, groups, etc. Roles can be configured to give as much or as little access as desired for a group of users. In this example, when someone assigns an Issue to the Level 1 Support Team, all five members receive an email notification and the Issue appears in the Team Assignment queue. Although the Technician role may not allow those users to take the Issue, the Team Leader role allows Jill to assign the Issue to one of the Technicians on the team. In addition, the Technicians may be restricted to only viewing Issues for their own team, while Jill could view the Issues for all teams in the Workspace.

Other Aspects of Roles and Teams

• One Role, Many Teams—While a user can be a member of multiple teams, a user can only have one user role within a Workspace. Therefore, within a Workspace, a user has the same permissions regardless of the team to which he or she belongs.
• Team leaders—Team leaders can be designated for a Team. This makes a convenient method for designating where an email should go when an Issue Escalation occurs.
• Customers—Customers cannot belong to teams because they cannot be assigned to Issues. Customers are organized by "organizational unit". (The organization unit is an optional property of a contact in the Address Book. Examples of an organizational unit include "Department", "Business Unit", or "Company". If an organizational unit is specified, the contacts in the Address Book are grouped by organizational unit). Customers can, however, be assigned to a customized role in order to create a special set of permissions.
• Same Name for Role and Team—While the ability to configure roles and teams separately gives you more flexibility, you can choose to give all of the users in a team the same permissions. In that case, you might, optionally, give the role and the team the same name.
• Optional—If the functionality provided in roles and teams is not needed by your organization, you do not need to configure these features at all. Users can be assigned individually without teams and can inherit the permissions of the built-in roles.