15.2.6 Parent Groups

Specifying a Parent Group allows you to attach two BRG’s together so that a group can inherit all attributes of another. Groups are not created as parent groups but become classified as a parent when they are attached to a group as a ‘parent group’. The permissions of the parent group are inherited down to the group to which it is attached. Note that the ‘child’ group permissions are NOT inherited upwards into the parent group.

The principal of associating a parent to a BRG is to make making enterprise wide administration easier and is similar in some ways of creating sub plans in the approval process. If it is decided that all users in an organisation should be granted permission to certain catalogues or financial tracking codes and these permissions are unlikely to ever change, it may be advantageous to place these permissions in a group that can be associated as a parent group. In this way duplication of administration setup tasks can be avoided.

For example:

An organisation utilises two accounting methods: ‘UK Accounting’ to account for all UK based operations and ‘EU Accounting’ to manage all of its European subsidiaries. All UK based employees will require access to appropriate accounting values for the ‘UK Accounting’ method, based, in the usual way, on their department and seniority. All members of the Finance and Administration division however will additionally require access to the ‘EU Accounting’ method. One option for the configuration of groups therefore could be to create one or more groups to grant access to all appropriate values for the ‘EU Accounting’ method. When creating BRG’s for accounting access to the ‘UK Accounting’ method for Finance and Administration users, these groups can be assigned as parent groups. This association will alleviate the need to duplicate the assignment of EU Accounting financial tracking permissions across these BRG’s.