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BUSINESS RULES
Development of DELEGATOR Multi-User was guided by a set of business rules concerning what DELEGATOR does and how it does it. A selection of these rules focusing on how DELEGATOR deals with multi-user considerations is shown here. By reading these business rules, all Users will gain a better understanding of the program and how to use it more effectively. Some of the features that were derived from these rules are discussed below.
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DELEGATOR users need to keep track of assignments given to more people than just other users.
The term 'people' or 'person' refers to anyone who receives an assignment. When a person is not a User he is 'external' and is one of three types: open; limited; or private. Assignment information is not automatically communicated to external people as it is to Users. Users can create private people as aliases for themselves or other Users when they do not have rights to give assignments to a User, or don't want the assignment to be visible to others. The word 'assignee' has been used in some places for those people who are also Users.
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Organizations determine which users can give assignments to which other users.
A System Administrator must determine which other Users can give assignments to a User. This can be accomplished in less time by using User Groups to select several Users at once.
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Organizations determine how much information on assignments and people is shared among users.
The View All People option in System Preferences allows all Users to see all the assignments of all the people who use DELEGATOR. This option is OFF at the time of installation, and we believe that most organizations will wish to keep it that way. When View All People is OFF, a System Administrator must select which of the other Users have the right to view a User's assignments. When View All People is OFF, Users also cannot see the assignments given to private people by other Users or to limited people for whom they do not have access rights. There is one important exception to this: if an assignment has been placed in a project all Users authorized to use that project can see the whole assignment information except confidential comments. See below.
When View All People is ON, the amount of information presented to a User can be overwhelming, particularly if private people are used. The Allow Private People option should be turned OFF if View All People is ON.
The remainder of these business rules assume the View All People function is OFF and Allow Private People is ON.
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Organizations determine whether separate confidential information can be collected, as well as general information.
By default, DELEGATOR permits the User who gives an assignment or creates a private person the ability to keep confidential notes on the assignment or person. These notes are visible only to that User. Some organizations may prefer to disable this feature by turning the Allow Confidential Comments option in System Preferences to OFF.
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Users should only be presented with valid choices for selection.
Because their rights for giving assignments may be different from their rights to view assignments, Users may find they are presented with different lists of people from what appear to be the same Browse People windows. To ensure that only valid choices are entered, DELEGATOR sometimes forces Users to select from these limited lists.
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To maintain the data base, System Administrators must be able to delete or change virtually any of the information in it.
System Administrators can view and change virtually any information, except confidential comments. Therefore, the number of System Administrators should be kept to a minimum. Because so much information is displayed to System Administrators, the System Administrator ID is impractical to use for anything except System Administrator duties. For that reason, the purchased license will include additional free User IDs for use by System Administrators.
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For most functions, users are mainly interested in assignments given to themselves and by themselves.
The major DELEGATOR functions for viewing and printing assignment information (Assignments Due Now, Look Forward, and History windows) are set by default to limit the assignments displayed to only those given by or to the current User. To view or print assignments given by other Users to an open person, a limited person or User for whom they have viewing rights, they must turn on the View All check box for those windows.
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Users must know when an assignment has been given to them or has been changed.
On start up, Users are alerted when they have received a new assignment or when one of their existing assignments has been changed. They can view any unseen or changed assignments by selecting View Unseen.
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Only the user who gives the assignment should be able to change key assignment information and decide if the user receiving it can mark it as concluded.
Except for System Administrators, only the creator of an assignment (the assignment owner) can change or delete it. The owner also determines if the assignee (also a DELEGATOR user) can conclude the assignment. However, the assignee can add his own notes to the assignment record that are visible to the owner but can't be changed by the owner.
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Users will want to group related assignments as projects and some of those projects will involve all or some users.
Any grouping of assignments is called a project in DELEGATOR. All Users can create private projects that can only be used by themselves. People Administrators and System Administrators can also create open (available to all Users) and limited (available only to selected Users) projects for grouping assignments. Once a project has been created, both the owner of an assignment and the User who received it can place an assignment on any project list to which they have access. Once an assignment has been added to a project, any User who has access to the project can view the assignment information, except for confidential comments.
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