License inheritance in group hierarchies
Licenses determine the Spotfire features and functionality that are available to users. Licenses are set at the group level, so when you create groups, you should also set the licenses that apply to each group.
For more information, see Groups and licenses introduction.
Groups can contain other groups as well as individual users, so you can build a hierarchy of groups. Within the hierarchy, in addition to any licenses that are assigned directly in the groups that a user belongs to, the user also inherits the licenses of all the groups above them in the hierarchy.
The idea is to create a hierarchy of groups, where you assign licenses as high up in the hierarchy as possible. The top groups contain the basic Spotfire functionality that all users need. Then, for more specialized groups farther down in the hierarchy, you can enable more advanced licenses to supplement the basic licenses that they inherit.
If a certain feature is enabled in one group, and disabled in another group, a user that is a member of both groups (whether directly or through inheritance) will have access to the feature.
If a group's parent groups contain conflicting settings, you can control which group has precedence by setting a primary group; for more information, see Assigning a primary group to a subgroup.
The following three examples demonstrate how inheritance works among groups, and gives an idea of how these features can be used. In the examples, features and licenses that are inherited are explicitly marked as such.
Finally, A group hierarchy template offers some best practices to consider when structuring your groups.
Example 1
In the first example, the group GLOBEX Analytics contains all users that should have the Spotfire Analytics license. The administrator sets the Spotfire Analytics license for that group. But not all users should be able to register data functions, so the administrator switches off the license feature Register Data Functions.
Finance Analytics should be able to register data functions, so the administrator creates separate groups for Sales and Finance Analytics. The Finance Analytics group has the Register Data Functions feature license switched on.
The administrator then decides to split the Finance Analytics group into two subgroups, and does not add any users to the GLOBEX Finance Analytics group. Instead, the administrator creates the subgroups Americas Finance Analytics and Europe Finance Analytics, and adds the appropriate users at that level. Members of both of these groups inherit the Register Data Functions license feature from their parent group.
Because library permissions can also be set for groups, the administrator will later provide separate library sections so that the Americas Finance Analytics can share analyses in one section, and the Europe Finance Analytics in another.
Example 2
In the second example, the administrator assigns the Spotfire Analytics license to the GLOBEX Analytics group, but switches off the Create Pie Chart license feature because the average user should not be allowed to perform that task.
However, for the group Analytics Drinks, the administrator explicitly switches on the Create Pie Chart license feature, because those users require the features to do their job. The users working with food analyses do not get access to that feature; they have only the licenses and features that are set for their parent group.
Example 3
Not all groups need to be placed in the same hierarchical, top-down tree. It can, for example, be powerful to handle licenses in a hierarchical tree, but parallel to that create a number of separate top-level groups that correspond to another property of your company, such as projects. These groups could be used to handle Spotfire library privileges. (Library access rights are configured in the installed Spotfire client.)