Restricting member access to 'search for others'
The Search for Others feature in My ChurchSuite is great for enabling people to stay in touch and communicate with one another in a secure and appropriate context, while always respecting each person's privacy settings in terms of the amount of basic contact information that people can see of other members in the search results.
If you don't want to make the Search available, the feature can be disabled. However, it's possible to enable the Search but restrict access and restrict who shows in search results. For example, you could exclude 'newcomers' from accessing the search and from being included in search results. Access restriction and Results restriction are managed using Tags and are set in the Profile section of your Account Settings. On the My ChurchSuite Options tab, locate the Search for Others settings and click Edit to make changes.
On the Edit pop-up, the Enable Search for Others setting enables or disables the feature. Three further settings determine how the Search functions:
- By default, Search for Others is accessible to everyone with My ChurchSuite access, but you can Restrict access by Tag. The tag restriction also includes restriction options for All contacts and All children, which can be used in combination to restrict access to contacts only and only those in selected tags. For example, you might restrict usage of the search feature to "All contacts" (i.e. not children), or just those in a 'Staff Team' tag or a 'Leader' tag. Multiple tags can be specified, including smart tags. Contact tag and Children tag restrictions are supported.
- By default, Search for Others results include all Address Book contacts with "Name is visible" set but you can Restrict results by Tag. For example, you could restrict results to just those in a 'Members' tag. Multiple tags can be specified, including smart tags. Only Contact tags are supported - children never appear in search results - the feature only searches across the Address Book.
- For customers with multiple sites, a further setting determines whether to Allow people to search across all sites or just the sites a person belongs to (i.e. their own site or sites).
