Understanding structure and permissions

Three mechanisms decide what each person sees and can do in Beedeez: departments, groups and permissions. They get confused because all three are ways of sorting people. They do not answer the same question, and mixing them up is what produces an access that looks wrong.

Departments split administration

The department models your org chart: subsidiaries, brands, regions, entities. Each department has its own content, groups, statistics and administrators. Departments exist on accounts where the hierarchy option is enabled; without that option your account has a single perimeter and the question comes down to how you split learners into groups.

The rule that governs them: you see your department and everything below it, never sideways, never above.

Departments answer the question: who administers what? To split yours up, see Modelling your organisation.

⚠️ Rights required: creating and editing departments requires the Edit / add departments right.

Groups segment learners

The group gathers learners to receive content. A group lives inside a single department, never across several. It can be static, and you decide who is in it, or dynamic, and criteria fill it automatically.

Groups answer a different question: who receives what? What a group is and is not: Understanding groups. To create them: Creating and organising user groups.

The difference between a department and a group

The department is the org chart; the group is the population.

One department holds as many groups as needed, and a learner belongs to as many groups as needed. A learner is, however, attached to a single department.

In practice: if your need is “the Lyon team must not see Bordeaux’s content”, that is a department. If it is “new joiners must receive the onboarding track”, that is a group.

Permissions decide what each person may do

The first two mechanisms say who exists and who receives. Permissions say who is allowed to act. They are made of four independent families, edition, diffusion, animation and statistics, plus administration rights. The families in detail: Understanding custom permissions. To assign them: Assigning rights.

The split is strict: the permission says what you may do, the department says what over. Two people with the same profile in two different departments therefore do not see the same thing.

⚠️ Rights required: creating a permission template and assigning a profile require the Edit / add authorizations right.

Two special cases follow from this articulation.

The account owner holds no permission profile at all, and that absence of restriction is what gives them every right. Nobody can grant them a right or take one away.

On an account organised in departments, Administrator is no longer offered when you create a permission. The predefined profiles available are then Deputy, Content editor, Content creator and Statistics. The Deputy carries the same rights as the Administrator minus the account configuration, which makes it the most complete profile you can grant. See Getting started as a deputy.

The two traps

⚠️ A permission is not access to content. An administrator who belongs to no group sees nothing on the learner side, whatever their rights. It is the most common trap: see Common problems.

⚠️ A missing right greys nothing out: the screen disappears entirely. The menu, tab or button is simply not shown, and an option that is not enabled on the account produces the same absence. Before concluding it is a bug, see Why can’t I see this feature?.

Where to start

1. Do I need departments? Only if entities must be walled off. On a simple account one department is enough and you will never think about it again.
2. Which groups? Design them around what you are going to distribute, not around the org chart: that is already carried by departments.
3. Who administers? Profiles come last: they sit on a structure that already exists.

Going further

• Modelling your organisation: split up departments without trapping yourself.
• Understanding groups: what a group is, static or dynamic, and what it is not.
• Understanding custom permissions: the four rights families and their gradations.
• Assigning rights: give someone a profile, step by step.