Hello All,
I am no longer a "newbie" to Analytics, though I would hardly consider myself an expert yet as I am still too enamored over the SSRS reports that I have built. But in continuing to try and take advantage of the power of Analytics and in working with one of our resident companies, I have noticed that they have access to information that is coming from our default control group. This control group we have (re)named to be "Campus All Access" because we are a consortium, and, since one cannot define who does and who does not have access to that control group in Tessitura Security, every user group has access to it (thus the campus).
I suppose I knew this when I first set things up for Analytics when we first went live with that upgrade, but what I had forgotten until now is that it ALSO does not appear as an option for Analytics either. Which seemingly means that every user group ALSO has access to anything in that control group. Historically, we have just put the vouchers for all of our resident companies there because it made no real difference and was nice for people to be able to find them.
But now that one of our resident companies is wanting to do reporting on vouchers, they are finding it hard to get accurate numbers because they are seeing the vouchers for the other 5 resident companies as well. Before I embark on the fun process of reassigning all vouchers and whatnot back to their specific control groups (which, arguably, should have been done in the first place, but that is neither here nor there at this point in time), is there ANY way to control who has access to the default control group in Analytics and I am just missing it? Or am I just stuck with a reassignment project that I was probably going to have to do eventually anyway?
P.S. I understand the reasoning behind every user group automatically having access to the default control group as a means of preventing them from accidentally having zero data whatsoever to access, but... am I alone in thinking that that is a standard that should go away? And, by extension, each user group then having a "default" control group that is the one "automatically" assigned to things like new lists instead of the overall "default control group" for EVERYONE?
Anyway, I have taken enough of your time.
John A. Moskal II
I think it's a little more like Perf0: Control Group is always a required column and there needed to be a default value to go there even when for whatever reason one didn't need to be selected. It sounds like you renamed the default "Campus All Access", but then later wound up with a class of non-campus users, and so would want to have "Campus All Access" be a regular security group applied to all campus users to separate them from the non-campus users?
I can't speak to Analytics, but the "Default" control group hasn't always been around, so before its existence my consortium created a control group called "shared" because there were some things, e.g. primary addresses, that couldn't belong to only one organization. When the "default" control group was created (in 2012, according to my TR_CONTROL_GROUP entry), it was a welcome addition for our consortium!
That said, almost everything in our Tess instance is control grouped with an org-specific control group, i.e. not the "default," and our users understand that anything set with the "default" control group is available for all eyes in our consortium.
No, they are campus users, too. Really it is that absolutely no one ever paid attention to the issuance of vouchers in the past, they only ever cared about redemptions, which was tracked of course as comp tickets with comp reasons, and who ever set it up initially was too lazy to do it right by putting each one in each specific organization, and I never cared enough myself to bother to enforce a database-wide change to the practice and am stuck with this situation now that someone IS bothering to report on voucher inssuance.
But I do wish there was a way to specify a default for each user group instead. Having the -1 value as the default for EVERYTHING is just a little not great in my book.
Yeah... so basically it is "John, you should have taken care of this years ago", and yeah, I probably should have. Oh well.
But the fact that in the "Division" set up for Analytics does not even give me the option of assigning the default/-1 value anywhere says to me that "this is out of your control", and I do not tend to like things in my database that are outside of my control. Regardless of how much I suggest against it, people still create lists, extractions, etc... and then assign it to the default control group without paying attention.
To your first point, well, yeah, maybe. ;)
To your second point, though, I have a script that runs at night and assigns control group to things that my consortium has agreed are okay to set, like campaigns, lists, etc. The control group is determined by the user who created the campaign/list/etc.
We also keep things simple in our consortium with pretty much only one control group per organization, and then I have a table that maps the organizations to the control groups (and the TNEW organizations, if they're different, to the correct control group). This helps with those things in the system that work off of organization ID rather than control group.
Funny enough, I also have a table mapping control groups to organizations. I use it ALL the time in terms of comparing data across organizations and rounding up things for campus reporting. I even have a SECOND table mapping organizations to organization groups because we have 6 resident companies, our organization itself is split into a main organization and a sister organization and then of course we have rentals that take place in 3 different venues. And then ALL ticket sales still take place on our custom + TNEW website. So... fun.
Though with control groups, we have generally opted for at least two control groups per organization as our Development people are VERY private and do NOT want other staff being able to see contribution amounts for patrons, limiting their exposure simply to different membership levels (though how knowing someone who has the membership level that is given to someone who give between $5,000 and $9,999 is significantly different to knowing the precise dollar amount they give being $6,500 is beyond me). At any rate, I have never been able to get people to agree to automatic assignments of control groups (yet).
It may help to think of it this way: The "Default" control group replaced (as Katie alluded to), the previously allowed scenario of having some items with no control group at all. As Gawain mentioned, control group is no longer nullable, hence the existence of the "Default" control group. However, the use case remains the same: items with the "Default" control group should be items that don't need to be control grouped; in other words, anything with the "Default" control group is visible to all by design. That's the reason you cannot assign or unassign it to any division. Everyone always has permission to the "Default" control group, whether it's a user group or a division.
All that said, it is possible to assign a specific default (not the Default -1) control group to specific user group. This can be done in the Security application from the same screen that assigns the user group permission to control groups. This would probably help the issue with lists, output sets, etc.
Always good to keep that in mind. Thanks all!