QuickBase: The Missing Manual

Chapter 9. Managing Roles and Groups

Managing QuickBase applications, as described in the previous chapter, is a breeze. Managing the people who work on an application is something else entirely. You want to make sure your team stays on track, with everyone doing their part to move the workflow along. But—as you know if you’ve ever caught someone playing Minesweeper on company time—people don’t always perform the way you want them to. Although QuickBase can’t do much about employees who shop on eBay, it can help ensure that everyone’s looking at only what you want them to see.

When you add users to an application, you assign each one a role that determines his or her level of access to that application. Even better, you can define those roles in whatever way makes sense for your application. And when you’re working with an application that has many users, you can save yourself a lot of time by creating groups of users. By assigning each group (and everyone in it) a role, you can manage people en masse instead of one by one. This chapter shows you how to use roles and groups to keep everyone organized.

Managing Roles

In most organizations the work gets done because people know their roles and understand the jobs associated with those roles. Take the circus, for example. You don’t see the guy who mucks out the elephant stalls flying around on the trapeze—he doesn’t have the skills or the training for that role. And if clowns take on the ringmaster’s role, they’re only doing it for laughs. ...