Restricting visibility and access with User Groups

Overview

It's sometimes the case that you want to restrict the visibility of content of certain features in ChurchSuite so that information added is private and only visible to certain 'groups' of users - what we call User Groups - and not visible to other users who are not members of the User Group. It's possible to restrict the visibility of Notes, Tags, Key Dates, Forms, Flows, Leave Setup, Preset emails and SMSs, along with Resources in the Bookings module.

For each of the above features, you can set the visibility - either to All Users (i.e. all ChurchSuite users, not all members), Just me (private to the creator/author) or to one or more User Groups.

You can also set User Group Visibility. By default a User Group is only visible to the group's members - this means that even the existence of the User Group and any content restricted to that User Group is only visible to the User Group's members. However, it is also possible to set a User Group's existence to be visible, which means that those not in the User Group can restrict the visibility of things to a User Group that they don't belong to.

For example, you might have a "Safeguarding" User Group that you want to be visible to all users so that any user could add a confidential Note and restrict visibility to just those in the Safeguarding user group. While any user can add a confidential note to the Safeguarding user group, they are prevented from viewing other notes restricted to the Safeguarding user group, including the note they have just added.

Adding a user group

In the Administrator section, click on the Groups menu. Here you can manage existing User Groups - to View, Edit or Delete an existing group. Click to Add group...

The Add group pop-up opens. Give the User Group a suitable Name, and set whether to Restrict visibility of the group to only users in the group. Note that the group can be assigned a shared Email address - when sending emails, users within the group can send on behalf of the group's email address as an alternative to their User email address (see the related support article called Shared email addresses for user groups). Click Save to add the new User Group.

Now, working within the User Group's "View" page click Add to group to add one or more users to the group. From here you can also Edit the group, perhaps to change the group's name, visibility or shared email details or use the action menu to Remove a user who is no longer part of that group.

You can return to a User Group page at any time to Add or Remove users to the group.

Restricting visibility of content to a user group

Now, when adding or editing any of the features listed above, such as a Form, the user can select to restrict the note's visibility to a user group. Only user groups that don't have visibility restricted and user groups the user belongs to are shown in the list.