Groups & Organizations: Setup Guide

Groups and organizations

Should I use groups, organizations, or both?

• Group: a set of users you put together by team, country, product line or any other criteria. Use groups to give content privileges, send notifications and compare activity in Group analytics. A user can be in as many groups as needed.
• Organization: a special kind of group for a separate company or unit, such as a dealer, partner or subsidiary. It works like a group for content privileges and notifications, and adds two things: its own brand, and, together with custom roles, boundaries around its people and analytics. A user can belong to one organization.

➡️ Many Workspaces need both.

Use a group to:

• Give a team access to the right folders, for example price lists for Sales and manuals for Service
• Let a few people manage content, for example with a Management or Editors group
• Send notifications to a team, a country or all dealers at once
• Compare how teams, regions or product lines use Showell in Group analytics

Because a user can be in several groups, you can combine criteria, for example Sales, Germany and product-line at the same time.

Use an organization to:

• Give each dealer, distributor, partner or subsidiary its own space in your Workspace
• Let their Digital Sales Rooms carry their own brand instead of yours
• Share a folder with one dealer only, such as their price list
• Make sure their people only see their own colleagues, for example when adding Share collaborators. This needs a custom role with View Org Users.
• Give their manager the analytics of their own organization, and let them notify their own team. This needs a custom role with Read Org Analytics and Notify Org Users.

Without such a custom role, members of an organization see, and are seen by, everyone else as usual. See Manage Roles.

Use both together:

A manufacturer that sells through dealers typically sets up:

• One organization per dealer, with the dealer's brand, for their own people, results and price lists
• One Dealers group with all dealer users, for the product content every dealer gets
• Groups such as Sales and Service for the manufacturer's own teams

For a full example, see A Guide to Roles, Groups and Privileges.

 

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Create a group or organization

• In the Showell App for Web, open Admin > Groups & Organizations from the side menu.
• In the top right corner, click + Create and choose New group or New organization.
• Give it a name and confirm. Adding the type to the name, for example Coral Coast (Dealer), keeps long lists easy to scan.

 

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Manage members

Option 1: From the group or organization itself

• In the Showell App for Web, open Admin > Groups & Organizations and click the group or organization.
• In the Add a new member field in the top right, type a name and pick the user from the list.
• To remove users: click the 3 dots next to a name > Remove, or tick several users and click Remove at the bottom of the page.

➡️ You can also open the properties of a group or organization with the settings icon on the right of its row, and click Manage members.

Option 2: From the user's settings

• Open Admin > Users and click the user to open their properties.
• Under Organization, choose the organization the user belongs to.
• Under Groups, add groups in the Add to groups field. To remove one, click the cross next to its name.
• Click Save changes when you are done.

➡️ The Users list shows each user's organization and groups in their own columns, so you can check your setup at a glance.

Option 3: Several users at once, from the Users list

• Open Admin > Users from the side menu.
• Tick the users you would like to add or remove.
• Click Add/Remove from groups at the bottom of the page, choose Add to or Remove from, then the group name(s).
• Click Add/Remove to confirm.

➡️ This bulk option works for groups. To add users to an organization, use Option 1 or 2.

Option 4: With an invitation

When you invite users, open Additional options and choose their organization under Organization. It is set to No organization by default. Invited users join the organization as soon as they accept.

Moving a user to another organization

Open the user's settings in Admin > Users, choose the new organization and save. A user can only belong to one organization, so this moves them. The user may need to sign out and back in before their analytics count towards the new organization.

 

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Set an organization's brand

Give a dealer or partner their own look, in Showell and in the Digital Sales Rooms they share. A brand is optional: without one, members see the Workspace default.

• Open Admin > Groups & Organizations > Organizations tab.
• Click the settings icon on the right of the organization's row to open its properties.
• Under Brand, choose one of your Workspace's brands. The change is saved right away.
• Did you limit who can use that brand with access privileges? Then Showell asks whether to give the organization access to it. Click Continue to grant access and apply the brand.

You add brands, and set who can use them, under Admin > Branding.

➡️ See Branding your Workspace and Digital Sales Rooms for more information.

Members see the organization's brand instead of the Workspace default from their next sign-in. A member's own choice in My settings > Preferences > Brand comes first. When they choose No preference, the organization's brand applies again.

 

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Convert a group or organization

Already have a group per dealer? You do not need to start over.

• Open the properties of the group or organization.
• Click Convert to organization, or Convert to group.

A group can only become an organization when none of its members already belong to another organization. Move those users first.

When an organization becomes a group again, its members stay in it, and any folder privileges you gave it still apply. What stops: the organization's brand, and the Org options in custom roles, such as View Org Users, no longer apply to its members.

 

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Remove a group or organization

• Open the properties of the group or organization.
• Click Remove group, or Remove organization.

You can remove a group that still has members. The users keep their accounts, and any privileges you gave that group stop applying. An organization can only be removed once it has no members left, so remove its members first.