5.2. Groups

RT has a built-in group management system to make it easy to manage your users' rights and responsibilities. You can grant rights to groups and make them queue and ticket watchers. Using RT's Saved search system, it's also possible to let group members share saved searches among themselves. You're not required to use groups when managing RT. But it's a lot easier to pop somebody into a group when they join your team and yank them out if they leave than go through 10 different queues looking to see if you've properly yanked any rights they once had.

5.2.1. Creating and Updating Groups

To create, update, and disable groups, you need to be logged in to RT as a user with the AdminGroups right (or SuperUser). The first step is to go to the group management interface. From RT's web interface, click Configuration, then Groups, then New group. You should now be on RT's new group page, shown in Figure 5-2.

Figure 5-2. Create a new group

Enter a name and description for your group. The name will be seen primarly by people, not by computers, so make sure it's easy to understand when you (or somebody else) come back to it in six months. "Staff," "IT Department," and "Nuclear Weapons Development Team" are all fine names. Description is strictly optional and is just another place for you to record a bit more data about what this group is for.

5.2.2. Disabling a Group

As with many other things in RT, you can't ever delete a group, since you'd lose historical information about what happened to that group. You can, however, disable groups, by unchecking the enabled checkbox. Once the nuclear weapons project is over and the development team has retired to a small tropical island, it's safe to uncheck the enabled box on the group overview page for the "Nuclear Weapons Development Team."

5.2.3. Changing Group Membership

Once you've created a group, you can add and remove group members by navigating to the group overview page Configuration > Groups > <your group> and clicking on Members. Since RT 3.0, group membership has been recursive groups can contain both users and other groups. There isn't any limit to how many levels deep groups can contain other groups. The only thing a group can't contain is itself, but don't worry, RT will stop you before you do that.