A group is a collection of users or doors who share a set of assignments. In addition to the group members, each group has a set of group assignments which you determine by asssigning them to the group. These are displayed as assignments of the group itself. If you assign a user to a user to a user group, or a door to a door group, it will be assigned the group assignments. If you assign anything else to a group, it will be assigned both to the group and to the group members. Group assignments can be removed, in which case they will be removed from the group members. However, you can, if you wish, remove an assignment from a group member without affecting other group members or the group assignments. Note that if you just want to group doors or users for your own convenience, the grouping having no significance to your access control setup, you can do that simply by not having any group assignments.
If you have a database created with an earlier version of Access Manager it will be updated such that the group assignments will be determined by the assignments common to all other members of that group.
Group members can be members of more than one group. If you want to move a group member from one group to another you must remove it from the original group.
Note that if you remove a user from a user group or door from a door group, it will retain its assignments; it is your responsibility to decide which to keep or delete.
A number of changes were made to the operation of groups in Access Manager 2.2.2 in order to make them more flexible and easier to manage. Existing databases are updated automatically, but the update has no affect on the existing access control setup because Access Manager modifies the existing groups according to the original group operation rules.
| Operation Before V2.2.2 | Operation Since V2.2.2 |
| Access Managed dynamically determined the group assignments by assigning to a new group member the assignments that the existing groups members held in commmon. | Access Manager maintains a list of group assignments which will be assigned to new group members. |
| Only the group members were displayed in the tree pane, not the group assignments. | Both group members and group assignments are displayed in the tree pane. |
| A door or user could only be in one group at a time. | A door or user may be in an indefinite number of groups. |
| Dragging a group member from one group to another would remove the member from the first group. | Dragging a group member from one group to another will result in the group member being in both groups. |