What Is a Group?
A group is a collection of registered Quickbase users to which you give a name. Any user who has the power to create an app, can create a group. If you do not have permission to create app, you cannot create new groups.
As an app manager, you can add an existing group to your app. To do this in your app, click Users > Share app with new user. Enter the name of the group you want to add and click Send.
Why create a group?
Groups can help you manage your account or application very efficiently. When you create a group, you can gather similar users together and grant application access or special permission rights to all members at once. For example, say you frequently share applications with all twenty people in your sales department. Sure, you can share with them one by one, but why not save yourself a lot of time and effort by gathering them all together in a group? That way, you can share an application once with the "sales" group, instead of selecting twenty users and sharing with each one.
An added benefit of groups is that you can use them to control access permissions within an app. Normally, you control permissions by assigning a role to a user. This role determines what the user can see or do. Save yourself loads of time by assigning a role to an entire group. Whatever restrictions come with the role then apply to each member. For example, say you've created an app to manage your bow tie business. Sales needs to know what product line they'll be offering this year, but you don't want them to see next year's top secret, in-progress designs. (Will it be stripes or polka-dots?) You could create a role that controls access in this way and assign it to the "Sales" group. Likewise, you could create a "Design" group for your firm designers and assign this group a role that forbids access to sensitive sales commission information.
If you use groups to control access to your account and apps within it, they can even relieve you of the need to manually remove a user's application access or to deny a user. For example, if you've granted a consultant access to your app by adding him to a group, you can remove their access by deleting him from the group. If you're managing groups on the billing account level, this works the same way. Depending upon how you've structured your groups, removing a user from a group might take away their access to all apps in your account, for example. In this situation, you should make sure that no app manager has granted him access as an individual user. To do so, after you remove the user from any and all groups, access the Manage Billing Account page and check the Users with Access tab.
Note: Billing Account Administrators can manage any groups in their accounts.
Tip: If you're a Billing Account Administrator, you can assign a new user to a group, even before an app manager grants them access to information. This trick is called "provisioning" and it's a great way to ensure that a user has all the proper permissions in place, before they see your data. (Read about provisioning users.)
Groups and cross-app relationships
If you have created a cross-app relationship, and you want users to be able to edit parent records from within child records, you must grant them individual permissions. If they have permissions to the record through a group, they will not be able to edit the parent record.
Who manages groups?
Only users who can create apps can create a group. Quickbase recognizes the person who creates the group as its manager. It's easy for a manager to pass management to someone else or just to get help with management tasks.
Group managers can:
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Add members to or delete members from a group.
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Create additional or new managers. There are two scenarios in which you'd want to create a manager:
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Replace yourself as manager. If you're departing the company, you'll want to pass on group administration to another member of the group. Your Billing Account Administrator can also turn a member into a manager.
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Get help with management. Assign an additional manager to help you administrate the group. This person doesn't need to be a member.
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Delete the group.
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Nest another group inside your group.
If you are a Billing Account manager, you can manage groups in your account. You can also see a list of all the apps that a group can access and export a list of group members.
