The Preferences tab of the Administration Manager lets you specify certain preferences that should be used by default for the members of a group. Examples of these preferences could be, say, which font to use for labels, the default marker shape of scatter plots, etc. Preferences, like licenses, are inherited from parent groups further up in the group hierarchy if such a hierarchy exists. For details on how preferences are inherited, see Setting Primary Group.
Example:
There are two major groups of users at your company: Chemical Researchers and Sales Analysts. When the Chemical Researchers open data in Spotfire they most often want to use a Scatter Plot to visualize the data, and they want the markers to be colored so that low values are black and high values are yellow. When the Sales Analysts open data in Spotfire they most often want to use a Cross Table to visualize the data, and they want cells with low values to be colored red and cells with high values to be colored green.
Now, each user could define his or her preferences and defaults locally on their clients. However, a more user friendly way of doing the same thing, is for the administrator to define these default behaviors for the groups on the server. That way, each member of the groups will automatically get the appropriate behavior for his or her specific group.
Note: Preferences set locally by a user from the Spotfire client override the defaults specified on the server. However, a user can reset the settings to the server defaults if he or she wants to.
See also:
Setting Preferences for a Group