Tags | User groups |
ADMIN PRIVILEGES REQUIRED
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Overview
Organizations often have different groups of users responsible for different parts of their service. When questions arise under that group's area of expertise, pinging each user individually or picking and choosing who might be the best option can be cumbersome. We've introduced user groups as a method to allow you to reach out to entire groups of users with a single name, rather than individually pinging them all. With careful usage and management of user groups, you can ensure all people who need to know about certain inquiries are informed of it, even as your organization grows and changes over time.
The Main Site of Stack Overflow Enterprise is a one namespace for user groups, and each Private Team (if the Private Teams feature is enabled on your instance) is also a separate namespace for user groups. Site admins can manage user groups for the main site by clicking Admin Settings and then selecting User Groups. Team admins (i.e. Team owners) can manage user groups for a private team the same fashion, just selecting Admin Settings for the private team instead of the main site. For browsing existing groups, you can view a searchable list of all groups by clicking on view user groups at the top of Users page.
Create and populate a new group
To start creating a new group, click Add user group. You'll be prompted with providing a Name for the group, and an optional Description. The Description is only visible to Admins in the Manage Groups page and is meant for book-keeping, but the Name is what all users will see and use, so make sure it's reflective of what collection of people it needs to represent.
Once you've created a user group, click Add users, and you'll be provided a search field to add users to the group. As you type, SOE will search for users by name, email address, and external ID.
Modify a group
From the Manage Groups page, there are three management actions you can perform.
Add or remove users from an existing group Click on the name of the group, or on the listed number of members for the group. This will take you to the page shown earlier above. New users can be added by clicking Add users in the top right. Users can be removed from the group by clicking Remove on the right of the user's entry on the table. Use these actions to ensure the membership of each group is kept up to date.
Rename a group or change its description Click Edit on the right side of the table entry for the group. This will bring up a prompt with the group's current name and description that can be edited.
Delete a group Click Delete on the far right. Deleting a group will not affect any of the users in the group, but it will make the group no longer usable in the Q&A and remove any existing notification mentions of the group used in questions or answers.
Notify an entire group
Once your user groups are created as suits your needs, you can then use them in regular Q&A as a method to notify all the members of that group in one mention. When filling out a new question, the selection for Ask team members will now include any user groups as an option.
Within Private Teams, user groups can also be referred to in comments or posts using @ in the same way one would notify any individual member of the private team.