We set up AC as our project management tool for our church (internal use), and am trying to find the best way to set it up for our needs.
Basically, this is what we need to be able to do:
- create groups (Middle School Ministry, Senior Ministry, Communications, etc.), which I assume "should" be set up as clients, for each segment of the church. The Communications department (I'm part of it) will act as the admin, so I have it set up as the primary company.
- Create projects, and assign different groups to each one. For example, for a sample Middle School project, that may involve a pr, video promos, and website promotions. We need to be able to involve the Media, Graphics/Web, and Middle School groups involved and assigned tasks/milestones. Is it possible to do this?
- Open the "Docs" area to a select groups/companies. Possible?
I need to make sure AC can do these things, as they're necessary functions.
Projects can be assigned to members of only a certain group (like a department or a ministry group in your case) The biggest benefit of "client access" is that its easy to block their ability to see things even if they have a similar "role" as someone on the inside (maybe like you would allow another church to have access to discussions within a group, but do not want them to view everything even if they have a high level role)
Remember that members only see the projects they are part of... Only the system admin sees ALL the projects all the time.
We also setup filters that create reports based on departmental user groups.
All the other things you mention (projects/tasks etc.) are easy to accomplish for each group. It may be important for you to define the roles (access) more before you get started. Mostly because some users may get confused/lost if there are too many options available to them...
I don't know how you can do groups in AC though? From what I have seen, there is only "company" level, and a user can only be part of one single company.
We are currently testing AC as a internal church project management tool, and are very happy so far, with the exception of groups.
When you go to e.g. create a new discussion, ticket, you can select who will subscribe to your ticket, discussion etc.
Right now my only choices are "All of NNN church", or individually checkbox each user I want. With hundreds of users this gets messy.
I thought of splitting people up in multiple companies, but that creates other problems since a user can only belong to one single company.
At the moment, there is not possible to have one user in multiple companies or groups. User must belong to one and only company and there's no other way around that.
We'll see what we can do about this in the future, but at the moment that's the way how system works.
Basically, this is what we need to be able to do:
- create groups (Middle School Ministry, Senior Ministry, Communications, etc.), which I assume "should" be set up as clients, for each segment of the church. The Communications department (I'm part of it) will act as the admin, so I have it set up as the primary company.
- Create projects, and assign different groups to each one. For example, for a sample Middle School project, that may involve a pr, video promos, and website promotions. We need to be able to involve the Media, Graphics/Web, and Middle School groups involved and assigned tasks/milestones. Is it possible to do this?
- Open the "Docs" area to a select groups/companies. Possible?
I need to make sure AC can do these things, as they're necessary functions.
Thanks