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How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

  • 1.  How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Posted 19 days ago
    Edited by Pat Cooney 19 days ago

    Hello Everyone,

    I'm a Product Manager at TrueContext, and I'm seeking insights into how our customers structure their Groups and FormSpaces.

    As you're aware, a FormSpace can be associated with multiple Groups, and vice versa. This many-to-many relationship allows for various strategies in managing permissions and access.

    Our observations indicate that customers often organize their Groups and FormSpaces based on product lines, job types, roles, reporting hierarchies, geographical locations, and/or special projects.

    We are eager to learn from you about how you've set up your Groups and FormSpaces, what strategies have been effective, and what challenges you might be facing.

    Feel free to reply in thread, or reply directly to me. Looking forward to hearing from you!

    #TechTalkProduct



    ------------------------------
    Natalie Tallon
    Product Manager
    TrueContext
    ntallon@truecontext.com
    ------------------------------



  • 2.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Adopter
    Posted 18 days ago

    We typically organize our groups by type of employee (Safety, Admins, Foremen, etc.). The most specific groups we create are for certain customers/contracts. That allows us to immediately place new hires into the correct groupings based on their role in the company.

    Our FormSpaces are organized in a few different ways:

    1. Type of form (Dev, Production, Archive)
    2. Support Function (Safety, Fleet, HR)
    3. Customer or Division (Utility A or Western Transmission). This varies based on the structure of our subsidiary company and the relationship with their customers

    We have found this organization to be effective in allowing us to quickly give access to the right forms for the right people. Only Admin Group members have access to Dev and Archive FormSpaces. All employees typically have access to the universal support function forms. And then we can limit customer specific forms to the employees who work with those customers by using the 1:1 relationship between a group for Customer A and the matching FormSpace for Customer A.

    Would be interested to know if other companies have found any further classifications that help to keep the administrative side of things organized and easy to manage. 



    ------------------------------
    Matt Lambert
    Vice President of Operations
    PrimeLine Utility Services
    mlambert@primelineus.com
    ------------------------------



  • 3.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Posted 13 days ago

    Thanks Matt, that sounds pretty robust. 

    What do you mean by 'universal support function forms'?

    With this framework are you needing to duplicate forms in different FormSpaces? 

    Are the support function groups specific to each Customer/Division? i.e. do you have different groups for

    • Customer A - Safety
    • Customer B - Safety


    ------------------------------
    Natalie Tallon
    Product Manager
    TrueContext
    ntallon@truecontext.com
    ------------------------------



  • 4.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Adopter
    Posted 13 days ago

    Universal support functions just being safety and HR. In most cases, we can use a single safety or HR farm for all employees across divisions and customers. So we are able to keep single versions of those standard forms and grant access to all employees. This helps to avoid having duplicates of the same form in different FormSpaces. We try to avoid that if at all possible for the same reasons that Calvin discussed elsewhere in this conversation. 



    ------------------------------
    Matt Lambert
    Vice President of Operations
    PrimeLine Utility Services
    mlambert@primelineus.com
    ------------------------------



  • 5.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Posted 5 days ago

    Thanks Matt - I appreciate the insights!



    ------------------------------
    Natalie Tallon
    Product Manager
    TrueContext
    ntallon@truecontext.com
    ------------------------------



  • 6.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Adopter
    Posted 15 days ago

    Hi Natalie!

    Our formspaces are organized by type of job being completed. We have one for Field Rep work, one for Installation work, production and component forms, etc. Organizing by the type of work helps me quickly find specific forms/destinations/data sources when needing to make changes. 

    Our groups are setup similarly, by role. We have Field Reps, Installers, 3rd Party Installation Companies, Production Role, etc.

    Having the formspaces and groups like this has made it simple for us to set up new users and start new forms, by simply deciding who the form user will be. 



    ------------------------------
    Lisa Zido
    Technical Systems Administrator
    GOJO Industries Inc.
    OH
    ------------------------------



  • 7.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Posted 13 days ago

    Thanks Lisa, so would you say you've set it up so that there is 1 group to each FormSpace? (ignoring Form Designers)



    ------------------------------
    Natalie Tallon
    Product Manager
    TrueContext
    ntallon@truecontext.com
    ------------------------------



  • 8.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Adopter
    Posted 13 days ago

    Well, yes and no haha. Some groups like the Production group would only need access to the Production formspace. But FSRs would have access to Field Services and Installation formspaces, because they would use the forms in both. 3rd party Installers wouldn't though, so that group would stay with the Installation formspace only. 



    ------------------------------
    Lisa Zido
    Technical Systems Administrator
    GOJO Industries Inc.
    OH
    ------------------------------



  • 9.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Posted 5 days ago

    Thanks Lisa - appreciate the response :)



    ------------------------------
    Natalie Tallon
    Product Manager
    TrueContext
    ntallon@truecontext.com
    ------------------------------



  • 10.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Adopter
    Posted 14 days ago

    Our formspaces are split up as such:

    • Development
    • QA
    • Production (per branch)

    Dev is where all form development happens.

    QA is a mock up of a production formspace with all the integrations in place. QA is less used now that I'm not actively creating new forms or integrations - usually edits are tested in a draft version at the branch that I physically work at now. 

    Production is actually a collection of formspaces, one per branch location, each with their own copy of the forms from Dev. Each formspace has two groups - field users, office users. There also a few branches that have special groups that have access to multiple branches in the region.

    I mostly use groups are to filter which forms users can see. I'd honestly love more granular control over that - without it having to be based on formspace. We're a multi-disciplinary company so roughly half of our forms, data sources, destinations, resources, etc aren't used by the other half of the field crew, so it would be great to be able to filter those out so they don't even have to download them when reconciling.

    Additionally I have a lot of data sources and data destinations that are the same between formspaces, so if we had granular control over which forms/resources a user has access to independent of formspace, I would probably just consolidate all my formspaces into one production space and set permissions per form, which would eliminate all the duplicate resources and maintenance that goes with them.



    ------------------------------
    Calvin Hunter
    Project Manager
    Vipond Inc
    calvin.hunter@vipond.ca
    ------------------------------



  • 11.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Posted 13 days ago

    Thanks Calvin!

    If the forms are the same, what is the purpose of putting them in different FormSpaces? I know there are reasons for this, but I'm wondering what the reasons are in your case.



    ------------------------------
    Natalie Tallon
    Product Manager
    TrueContext
    ntallon@truecontext.com
    ------------------------------



  • 12.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Adopter
    Posted 13 days ago

    Morning Natalie,

    It's mostly to control who sees which forms. Some forms have multiple versions (for different code revisions) and a branch can only use the revision that applies in their jurisdiction. I learned pretty early on that users benefit from blinders.

    There's occasionally some branch-specific form edits they ask for as well but that's something I would sacrifice for ease of maintenance. Technically the branch admin staff can also create/edit their own forms in their formspace, but that is pretty rare. If I had form-level permissions instead of formspace I'd probably still have separate forms per branch, they'd just be in the same formspace so Val wouldn't need to copy our custom PDF docs into 15 formspaces he makes a change 😉

    There are probably some integrations that rely on formspace-specific data destinations/sources, but I could work around that nowadays.



    ------------------------------
    Calvin Hunter
    Project Manager
    Vipond Inc
    calvin.hunter@vipond.ca
    ------------------------------



  • 13.  RE: How do YOU Organize your Groups & FormSpaces?

    Posted 5 days ago

    Cal, "users benefit from blinders" is a great way to put it. Thanks for sharing your set up!



    ------------------------------
    Natalie Tallon
    Product Manager
    TrueContext
    ntallon@truecontext.com
    ------------------------------



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