Creating Groups

Groups are collections of users, and users have no realistic limitation on the number of groups to which they can belong. When creating a group, you have to provide default group information, such as the group's long name, short name, and group ID, image, and image path.

Members of groups can include users and other groups. In the Group Folder pane, you can assign a folder to the group. The folder to be used to house the new group folder must be a share point on the local volume to initially show up in the list, as seen below. You must define an owner for the new group folder. Once it's set up, either you can wait for the new folder to be created automatically by a task that runs periodically on Mac OS X Server, or in Terminal you can type

 sudo CreateGroupFolder 

To set up a group folder in Workgroup Manager:

1.	Select the workgroup and click the Group Folder tab. A common mistake is to not assign an owner to the folder. This will result in errors.
2.	Select a listed share point to set up a group folder in it. If the predefined Groups share point or any other existing share point is not listed in the Group Folder pane, create a mount record for it in the Network Mount pane of the Sharing window in Workgroup Manager.
3.	Next to the Owner Name field, click the Browse (...) button to choose an owner from a list of users in the current directory domain. The group folder owner is given read/write access to the group folder.
4.	Click Save. The group folder is named using the short name of the group with which it is associated.
5.	Create the group folder using sudo CreateGroupFolder in Terminal on the server.
6.	It is important to check the permissions for the newly created folder, because they may not be exactly what you want for your setup.

Tip

There are at least two ways in which you can facilitate a group member's access to the group folder when the user logs in: You can set up Dock preferences to make the group folder visible in the Dock, or you can set up login preferences so that the share point in which the group folder resides appears on the Desktop.