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Control Group Solution Needed!

Frances O'Connell
$organization

We are dipping a toe into the Control Group waters for the first time, in order to facilitate Plan usage across more departments.

Our Marketing department would like to use Plans to track engagement with community partners.  This requires a new set of Plan values, separate from the pre-existing plan values used by our Development department.

My needs:

  • Hide Community Engagement plan values from Plan dropdowns if user group doesn't have access to plan value control group
  • Hide Development plan values from Plan dropdowns if user group doesn't have access to plan value control group
  • Allow users who cannot USE Development plan values to still SEE those values on a plan
  • IE: The Marketing user who is responsible for maintaining the Community Engagement plan should not be able to apply a Development plan value to their plans, but they should to be able to view complete information on a Development plan.

My plan was to:

  1. Create a Development General control group and associate it with all user groups that need to be able to create/edit Development plans
  2. Create a Community Engagement control group, and associate with the Marketing UG that needs to create/edit Community Engagement plans
  3. Apply the Dev. General control group to all Plan values specific to Development plans, such that Marketing cannot apply them to Community Engagement plans
  4. Apply the Community Engagement control group to all new Plan values specific to Comm. Engmt. plans

The first problem I've encountered, perhaps obvious to those more familiar with control groups, is that when the Marketing user without access to the Dev General CG is looking at a Development Plan with Dev General CG'ed values, those values show up as their numerical ID number.

I tried associating the Marketing UG with the Dev General CG but unticking the Edit box - that brings back the visibility, but doesn't seem to restrict permissions at all. 

Is what I'm trying impossible?

Many thanks for reading and any insight!

  • $organization

    I'm not 100% on the specifics of controlling Plan access, but almost all Control Group schemes fall down on this:

    • Allow users who cannot USE Development plan values to still SEE those values on a plan

    This is an issue we've had with Control Groups on CSIs.  Basically, Control Groups let you see/hide specific data while Security Groups give you view/edit access to specific interfaces.  So you can either edit all Control Groups you can see, or you cannot edit any.

    Our best idea for resolving it was building either a report or a custom screen where we could selectively override security considerations, perhaps using a custom table to address the more complex privileges, but generally our huge project backlog has not allowed us to actually address this issue yet.

  • $organization in reply to Gawain Lavers

    Thanks for weighing in, Gawain.  Too bad there's not a simpler solution!

  • $organization

    Hi Frances. Try applying your Development control group to the Campaigns that the Development plans live in. Then grant the Marketing users read-only access to the Development control group. Users with Read-only rights to the control group on the campaign should only be able to see, but not edit, the plans.

    -Michael Flaherty-Wilcox, Tessitura Network

  • $organization in reply to Michael Flaherty-Wilcox

    Hi Michael,

    Thanks!  That works, in so far as the Marketing user can once again see the Development plan value, but cannot edit the Development plan.

    However, the Marketing user can still use the Development plan values on plans they DO have access to.

    I guess what I wish is that Read Only access to CG plan values allowed you to see them on Plans, but hid them from dropdowns.

    Maybe the solution would be some sort of service interceptor (and I've never built one) that wouldn't let you save a plan if you were using a plan value that was invalid for a given Campaign Type.  Or invalid if you only had Read access for its Control Group.