Overview of Global Groups

Information

You use global groups to:

• Restrict users in your company to view only information about the associated assets
• Filter information being viewed when a user is unrestricted or a member of multiple global groups.
• Give your customers access to information about their loads in the QTRACS application 
• Define a management hierarchy that mirrors your company's organization. You assign vehicles/drivers to the lowest-level groups, and assign those to groups containing their managers.

A user is restricted if the MISC permission "Can see data for all assets" is disabled in the assigned role. Create all user accounts before creating global groups.

To establish your organizational hierarchy, enter the lowest level groups that are assigned to vehicles and drivers, then enter the upper level groups.

You can add either assets (vehicles/drivers) or child groups to a global group, but not both.

Step By Step

1. If you're not in Administration, click Administration in the upper right corner.
2. Click the Global Groups tab.
3. Click Add new global group.
4. Type the global group ID and description. If this group is to grant access to your customer, use the company name. If this group is to establish your organizational hierarchy, use your organization names.
5. If desired, check the box to Limit history. When you limit history, in QTRACS users only see position history, message history, and driver logon event history from the date the asset is put into the global group. Performance Monitoring ignores this setting.
6. To display the group for all unlimited users, leave the box Visible to unlimited users checked. Unlimited users are those whose role is granted the permission "Can see data for all assets." These users can see and work with all vehicles and drivers. Uncheck the box to hide the group from users who are not members. This is helpful when you have a large number of organizational groups that unlimited users don't need to use for filtering the lists of assets.
7. To assign users, select the users in the list on the right and click Add.
8. If establishing a management hierarchy, click Child Groups. If not, click Vehicles or Drivers.
9. Select assets in the list on the right and click Add. .
10. If you added vehicles or drivers and wish to add the other asset type, click its tab and use the instructions above to add them to the list.
11. When you're finished, click save above the group details on the right.

Entity history access

When you set up a global group, you specify whether the users assigned to it can see all of the authorized assets' history, or only as of the date the asset was placed in the global group. In the QTRACS and Fleet Mapping applications, this affects access to:

• Vehicle position history
• Message history
• Driver logon event history

Typically you create different global groups for external users (your customers) and for internal users (your staff). You limit history for the external user global groups to ensure that your customer can't see where loads were delivered to other customers.

The Performance Monitoring and Critical Event Reporting applications ignore this setting. Typically, external users are not given access to Performance Monitoring and Critical Event Reporting.

Audit history

The audit history tab of a global group lists the date, time, user, and action for the creation of and each modification to a global group. You can use the information to see when and by whom modifications were made if necessary. Audit history records show which types of members were modified (uses, child groups, vehicles, drivers).

To see which members were changed on a given date, click the corresponding tab. The membership date is listed next to the entity. An example user listing is: MSMITH (3/31/13). User MSMITH was added to the global group on March 31, 2013.