Be warned: As we ramp up Next Generation Project planning and development, we’ll be coming to the community for more and more feedback and advice. This is one of the easiest ways in which you can shape the future of your software—if you have thoughts on a particular topic and the time to respond, join the discussion.
Andrew asked some questions last week on Postal Addresses; I’m here to ask about Control Groups. Control Groups have an interesting history in Tessitura. Implemented originally in v3.2, they were an attempt to solve the problem of how to limit the visibility of certain parts of the data. For example, how can I let a user see some contributions, but not all contributions? What started as a test of the concept (Attributes was the first entity to get Control Groups) has grown in Tessitura to cover almost all aspects of the application and has been quite successful.
We’ve been mulling over how to deal with Control Groups in the new software and have sort of come down on the side of keeping them more or less like they are now--tied to user groups and then tied to certain entities in the database. If we were only doing a service layer on the data, then we might implement the data filtering in the service itself. But we are also planning on having a separate reporting database that is available for reporting, analysis, list building, etc. and this reporting database can be accessed by any number of outside applications and data access methods. For this reason filtering the data in the database itself (as we do now) seems to make sense to us.
But this is not a totally settled decision and here is where we need your feedback. So it’s basically the same questions again on a new topic:
What are some challenges that you have surrounding Control Groups today? Do you know of future business needs that could impact Control Group use in the future?What do you like about Control Groups functionality in existing Tessitura? What would you like to see changed/improved about Control Group functionality?
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So I’d like to chime in a bit -- there should be a difference between “View” and “Utilize” in the world of control groups. There are times when staff needs to be able to see all of a person’s history but not necessarily utilize the components. Here is a user story to illustrate:
Samantha the Special Events coordinator is using elevated events to track event responses and money. Samantha also needs to be able to see all of a customer’s giving history and thus has access to the development fund/campaign control groups. However, Samantha should only have access to the “special events” funds when entering gifts. Currently, if she has View rights to the development funds, she can select those funds for gift entry. Or she has to use a different user group and re-login to view a customer’s history.