IRM has a general-purpose mechanism called Groupings that allows IRM Users to create heterogeneous collections of Managed Objects. Groupings support all of the Managed Objects listed in Managed Objects and are heterogeneous in the sense that objects from different Super Categories can be included in a single Grouping.
Groupings can be created purely for organizational purposes and/or for permissions-related administrative purposes:
Groupings can be created to represent organizational structures within a company or installed infrastructure systems, such as:
Teams,
Departments,
Divisions,
Business units,
Windows Servers
Outside Cable Plant
Risers and Backbones
Horizontal Cable Plant and Workareas
Managed Objects can then be assigned to these Groupings as an indication of:
Ownership (e.g. this division owns this equipment),
Membership (this user works in this team or this fiber Cable is part of Outside cable Plant)
Administrative control (this department administers this cabling)
some other relationship
When a Site Grouping is built on top of the Grouping, the members of the Grouping define the set of objects for which write access permission is granted. For example: a specific IRM User could be given write access to all the equipment and cables associated with just the Sales Department or for the entire Outside Cable Plant.
A single Grouping can play both of the roles above simultaneously. Continuing the previous example, a Sales Department Grouping can be defined and used to track all equipment used by that department. Additionally, a Site Grouping that references the Sales Department can be made and used to provide write permission to the Sales Department equipment objects.
There are several ways in which an object can be included in a Grouping. A single Grouping can become a member of a Grouping using any of the four following method:
METHOD
DESCRIPTION
Explicitly Referenced
This is achieved when the Object is added directly to the Grouping using Copy & Paste and is used to make limited member directly to a Group.
By Area(s)
This option allows all objects in the specificied Area(s) to become group members simple by being placed into the referenced Area. This is a quick method for granting permissions to all objects by Area.
By Grouping
This option allows a Grouping to be constructed from other Groupings. For Example: a Grouping named Datacenter could contain sub-groups that specifically relate to key parts of the Datacenter such as:
Windows Servers,
Unix Servers,
Facilities (Power),
Copper Patching,
Fiber Patching
This approach would allow permissions/access to not only be granted to a sub-grouping for those that require limited access but allow for users to be granted access to the higher level Datacenter grouping for those that require full access to all sub-groups referenced by the Datacenter Group.
By Filter
This is one of the most powerful mechanism for auto-assigning objects as members to a Group. It allows the user to specify membership to the group based upon some Field level criteria, defined by the user.
If the IRM User wants to assemble a set of objects that are principally organized in some way not covered by the above mechanisms, they can make one or more Filters that capture the correct set of objects, and define the Grouping in terms of those Filter(s). This transfers the full power and generality of the IRM filtering mechanism to Groupings and allows the IRM User to construct Groupings of very large numbers of objects quite simply.
For example: if there was a need for a Grouping to contain all the equipment owned by an organization from a particular manufacturer (which could be hundreds of thousands or millions of objects for global enterprises), such a Grouping could be constructed very easily from a manufacturer Category Filter.
Together, these mechanisms for including objects in Groupings give the IRM User a powerful combination of convenience, efficiency, and exact control.
IMPORTANT: adding objects to a Grouping via Filters can be computationally expensive and therefore negatively impact performance, especially for complex filters operating over large numbers of objects. Therefore, the other mechanisms (especially the first and second) should be preferred in cases where they can be easily applied to achieve the desired results.
