Group Ownership
In a team or organizational environment documents are typically handled collectively by multiple group members.
Group ownership feature enables groups to be defined as the owners of documents. When a group is set as the owner, all members of that group automatically inherit full permissions for the document, including the ability to delete it.
This feature significantly simplifies permission management and eliminate the need for special rules or workarounds, such as explicitly granting deletion rights to group members. At the same time, it is better aligned with the requirements of real-world organizational structures, where ownership is often collective rather than individual.
Benefits of group ownership feature:
- Facilitates collaboration in team-based workflows
- Removes dependencies on individual users for document management
- Provides a clear and intuitive system that seamlessly integrates with group-oriented work structures
Concept
Every document, folder, tag, category and custom field can be owned by user or by a group. In case entity (document, folder, tag etc) is owned by a group - all users in that group are considered owners for that entity (document, folder etc).
Owners have all permissions on that particular entity (folder, document etc), which means that owners can view, change, and event delete it.
In the following parts of this section we will use as example hypothetical organization - Acme Inc. Acme Inc has five teams:
- Marketing (Merry, Mara, Jane)
- QA (Casper, Elizabeth)
- Development (Mark, Dora, David)
- HR (Lila, Hana, Luke)
- Managers (Mark, Jane, Luke)
Each team has its own separate set of documents. Each team member has full access to the documents of his/her own team, in other words each team member can view, change, and delete every document of his/her own team. The first step in implementing described scenario is to create Papermerge DMS group entity for each team: Marketing, QA, Development and HR. Then every user should be assigned to that group.
Note
Depending on your setup, it may be the case that assigning user to groups is accomplished outside Papermerge DMS e.g. in Keycloak instance which acts as authentication provider, or in LDAP service etc.
Groups with Special Folders
Group entity may have special folders - inbox and home. Group's home folder
is folder where all documents and folder for that group reside. Thus HR team
will have its own home folder where all HR documents are. Each HR team member
is owner of all documents and folders in HR's home folder and thus they can access,
change, and delete them.
Users outside HR team don't have access to HR home folder: e.g. user Marry
from Marketing team does not have access to documents in HR's home folder.
Similarly story goes with group's inbox folder.
In animated picture below user lila, she is part of HR team, has two home
folders: her own and home folder of HR department. In her own private home
folder she has her private documents, among others a folder titled "Lila Hobby".
In HR home folder she can access, view, change, upload/download as well as delete at
her heart's will - HR department's documents.
User hana is also part of HR department. She also has full access to HR home
folder. hana's private home folder is empty.
Both hana and lila are full owners of every document and folder found in HR home.
Both users see HR home folder in the drop-down menu because they are both
part of HR group and HR group was created with
"special folder" checked.
Implicit Ownership Transfer
Everything placed in group's home or inbox folder will be automatically
owned by that group. For example if user lila uploads new document
from her local computer into HR home folder - uploaded document automatically
will be owned by HR group (not by lila). A less obvious example is following:
if lila moves her private document from her home into HR group home, then
ownership of that document will be implicitly transferred from lila to HR.
If she does it other way around i.e. moves document from HR home folder into
her own private home, then the ownership is transferred from HR department to
user lila.
Note
To transfer ownership of a document (or of a folder) from user to specific
group, you need to move that document (or folder) from your private
home or inbox to respective group home or inbox folder.
Following animated images illustrates this idea.
In this example, lila is moving document initially belonging to HR team to
her private folder. You can see that Owner field automatically changes from
HR to lila.
In this example, it is other way around: lila is moving document initially
belonging to her to HR department folder. You can see that Owner field
automatically changes from lila to HR.
Multiple Group Homes
If user belongs to multiple groups with special folders, then that user will
have multiple group folders in drop-down menu. For example user mark, who
belongs to Managers team as well as Development team. Both teams have their
own group with special folders.
Remember
Besides his/her own private home/inbox folder, user may multiple group home/inbox folders - one for each group he/her is part of. Precondition is that respective group has special folders.
Custom Fields, Categories and Tags
Custom Fields, Categories and Tags also may be owned by group. In fact, when
you create a tag (Custom Field, Category) you will need to decide who is the
owner of that tag. In case of user mark, because he belongs multiple teams,
he needs to choose who is the owner of "revised" tag:
Tags and Categories Visibility
Custom fields, categories and tags belonging to HR are visible only to
HR team. Group owned categories can be assigned only to documents
belonging to that group, which means that, for example, to a document
belonging to HR team can be assigned only categories which are owned
by HR team:
Same story is with tags: if document is owned by HR, then when trying to assign a tag, user will see only tags belonging to HR department. Same with custom fields: if category belongs to HR and you try to assign it custom fields, then you can choose only from custom fields belonging to HR team.