I am busy making user groups - specifically for sending SMS and email notifications. In our instance, we require certain messages to go to various different people. Therefore, I have created user groups based on the various roles.
However, in some instances, we want messages to go out to various different user groups. In the Program notification section, you can only choose one user group to send the message to. Therefore, I have created “Overarching” user groups that include several groups within them.
E.g. we have a group for lab staff. These lab staff would receive a certain message - I created a “Lab staff” user group. However, the lab staff must also receive a message that is sent to both the lab staff as well as the medical staff. The medical staff have their own user group (“Medical staff”). Thus, I created an overarching user group called “Patient outcomes” whereby “lab staff” and “medical staff” user groups are added under the “Managed user group” section. The “Group members” section only has one user under it as this is a mandatory field.
The issue is when sending messages to the overarching group “Patient outcome”, nobody from the “Lab staff” or “Medical staff” user groups receive the message. Only the one person listed under the “Group members” section receives the message.
Is there something that I have misunderstood in creating this overarching user group, or is this simply not how the system works? i.e. would I have to individually add each person from the 2 user groups to the overarching user group under the “Group members” section?
Any help would be appreciated.
I am running v2.30 build revision 853d10f.
Windows 10 using Chrome browser.
The logical solution here is to be able to send a defined message to several groups, not to force users to maintain a jungle of overlapping and semi-permanent “Overarching” groups. One cannot in general avoid a certain number of short/medium term groups of this type (e.g “project groups” that cuts across your standard organogram), but having to create and maintain group for every single type of message you want to define is not cost-effective.
I forwarded a link to your post to zubair - he’s the point fellah on messaging issues.
One of the Devs can confirm this, but I think the ‘managed user groups’ feature (called ‘managed users’ in the documentation) is not a ‘nesting’ of user groups - it’s actually supposed to be a way of giving one group of users full user admin rights (eg edit and delete users) over a limited subset of other users (the user groups in question).
To the best of my knowledge, this feature has been broken for quite a few years now (I last tested it a couple of years ago, and it didn’t work back then), but it’s possible that it’s been fixed at some point - I’d be keen to hear if anyone’s successfully using it.
Thanks for the clarification. I was never sure whether it was to provide user admin rights or whether it was for the ‘nesting’ of user groups as you mentioned. Either way in which I have tried to use it, I did not notice any specific effects, but I may have simply missed this.
It would be good to hear from others their experiences and whether they could shed some insight into how it should be used.
I ended up simply creating individual, separate groups for each of the messages that were required - in the end, this was not a massive number of groups luckily as we only needed a little variation for the message recipients. Unfortunately, there was no progress on the development of a function to be able to send a message to several groups as @Calle_Hedberg suggested, which would of course be the best solution.
Regarding the “managed user groups” function, I found the same as what @SamuelJohnson described where the functionality (to my knowledge at least) was broken. Therefore, as to its intended functionality, I am still not 100 % sure, but the description that Samuel provided seems to be the most logical.