Creating and managing groups

- One of the most powerful capabilities of InfraWorks 360 is its ability to allow you to collaborate with other users. Let's take a look at how groups are used to enable the collaboration process. I'm currently on InfraWorks home, and I'm logged in as a user called InfraWorksUser1, and I wanna start with showing you how to create a group. To do that, I'll expand this icon and click the first icon to the right of the House icon, which is Manage Group Membership.

To create a new group, I'll go to the Administer Groups tab and click the Add Group icon. I'm going to name my new group Lynda. I could enter a description if I like, but I'm not going to in this case. I'll go ahead and click okay. So now I have a brand new group associated with my InfraWorksUser1 account. What does that mean? You can think of a group as a place where you can publish models to share with other users, and those other users have to be invited into the group by the person who administers the group, which in this case would be me.

I've created the Lynda group, and I'm the one who will invite other users to it, because I'm an admin for this account. Once a user is invited into the group, they can see any model that's been published to that group. But what they can do with it depends on the level of permissions they've been given. So let's talk about that. If I go to the Add Users to Groups tab, and I add a user to my group by clicking the Add User button, in this case I'll add a user called InfraWorksUser2, I can choose what they're able to do by picking a role for them.

So an Author can pretty much do anything in the group. An Author can publish new models, can make changes to existing models A Publisher can not post new models or publish new models to the group, which is kind of confusing: we're calling them a Publisher but they can't publish new models. They can only publish changes to existing models. So, long story short an Author can post new models to the group, a Publisher cannot, but the Publisher can make changes to existing models. And then, the Reader is the lowest level of permissions.

A Reader can't post new models and can't make changes to existing models. They can only view models that have been published to the group. Now, what happens when I invite this user, when I click the done button, InfraWorksUser2 will get an email that says they've been invited to the group. So let me go ahead and do that. Now I'm not going to show the email that comes up. What I would like to do is log in as InfraWorksUser2. So I'm going to sign out. That's going to close down InfraWorks 360 and reopen it and give me the opportunity to log in again.

So now that I've signed out I can sign back in as InfraWorksUser2@gmail.com. That's just a bogus account that I created. Hopefully I can remember the password. And look at that, I actually did remember it. So now I'm signed in as InfraWorksUser2. Remember that I just invited InfraWorksUser2 to a group. So now that I'm logged in as InfraWorksUser2, right away I notice that under the Notices section, I have a pending invitation.

So I could click on that to accept it, but I want to show you another location, as well, where you'll see this invitation. So I'm not gonna click there, but that's by far the easiest way to accept an invitation. What I wanna do is expand this icon, go to the Manage Group Membership command once again, and here you can see this group invitation as well. So if I click the green checkmark I'll accept the invitation and allow myself into the group, or I can click the X if I don't want to be a part of that group.

I'll go ahead and click the green checkmark, and now I am a part of that group as well, and any models that are published to that group, I'll be able to work with. I'll click done, And that kind of concludes my group managing session.