Access Groups

What are Access Groups?

Access Groups in PoolCar are a feature designed to control and manage user access to vehicles within an organisation's fleet. By creating Access Groups, administrators can restrict which users can view or book specific vehicles, ensuring that only authorised personnel have access to certain assets. This is particularly useful for organisations with diverse fleets spread across multiple locations or departments, as it helps maintain security and operational efficiency.​

Key aspects of Access Groups include:​

• User Permissions: Administrators can assign users to specific Access Groups, limiting their ability to see or book only the vehicles relevant to their role or location.​

• Vehicle Allocation: Vehicles can be assigned to one or multiple Access Groups, allowing for flexible management of resources across different teams or departments.​

• Enhanced Security: By restricting access, organisations can prevent unauthorised use of vehicles, ensuring that only qualified personnel operate certain assets.​

Implementing Access Groups in PoolCar streamlines fleet management by aligning vehicle availability with organisational structure and user roles, thereby enhancing both security and efficiency.

Why Use Access Groups?

• Without access groups, any staff member can book any car in any department. When they go to collect the keys they may well be rejected by the person handing out the keys, but from a system perspective any user can book any car. Enter Access Groups.

• Access Groups segment your vehicles into virtual pools, with each pool having a group name. Similarly, staff are assigned to groups and a marriage is made when the user's group name aligns with the vehicle's group name.

Access Groups Example

A fleet contains 30 general-use vehicles and 2 station wagons reserved for the Physical Therapy (PT) team. Without access groups, all users could book all 32 vehicles.

To restrict access, create an access group called Physical Therapy and assign the two station wagons to it. Leave the remaining 30 vehicles unassigned from access groups..

• PT users will see all 32 vehicles

• Non-PT users will see only the 30 general-use vehicles

If PT users should only see their two vehicles, create a second access group (e.g. All Non-PT Staff) and assign the remaining 30 vehicles to that group.

Access Groups are Disabled by Default

By default, the Access Groups function is disabled for all customers. Before you enable this function, please read the rest of this article entirely.

Step 1 - Define Groups

The first step is to define our groups. Each group has a name. Give some thought to your group naming strategy!

1. Click Sysadmin > Access Group Names (under Pool Management or System Data for Campus Admin customers)

2. Type an Access Group Name and click Add. Repeat as necessary for each new access group name

Step 2 - Classify Vehicles

Next, we classify vehicles as belonging to groups. A vehicle can belong to a single group or multiple groups.

Vehicles can be assigned via Pools (recommended) or individually via the Asset/Vehicle Register (for the most control).

2(a) - Pools (Pool Management)

1. Go to SysAdmin > Pools > Edit Pool

2. Under section: Which group(s) can make bookings? - Select all Access Groups as required (created in Step 1)

3. Click Save

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2(b) - Vehicles (Campus Admin)

1. Go to SysAdmin > Vehicle Register > Edit Vehicle

2. Section: Access Groups - Select all Access Groups as required (created in Step 1)

3. Click Save

4. Repeat for each vehicle

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Step 3 - Users

Quick recap: We have defined Groups, and we have classified some (or all) vehicles to their groups. Next we determine how users get classified into groups. There are two ways:

(a) Explicit - we ask the user to select their group on the Welcome page; and the admins can update this via the Driver Register OR

(b) We define some rules and triggers

3(a) - Explicit

With this method, an extra field is automatically added to the Welcome page, asking the user to select which group they belong to. Note using this method a user can only belong to a single group. For users who have already been on the system and therefore completed the Welcome page, they will need to click 'Update My Details', on the bottom left corner of PoolCar, to set their group. This can be disabled via the Application Settings then Explicit assignment in the Access Rights group

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System Administrators can also update a user's access groups via the Driver Register. By disabling the above app setting you can create a scenario where only admins can assign drivers to Access Groups on an individual basis.

3(b) - Rules

A more advanced way to assign users to groups is setting up some rules-based triggers. This is quite powerful.

1. Click SysAdmin > Access Group Rules > Add New Rule

2. For the field, select a field that the user would have completed on the welcome page, options are:

   1. Email address

   2. Cost Centre

   3. Home Campus/Office

   4. Licence Type

3. For the condition, select an operator

   1. Contains (text)

   2. Starts with (text)

   3. Ends with (text)

   4. Equals (for Licence Type only)

4. For the value, select a value (for Equals) or type some text to do a partial match (for Contains text)

5. Select an access group to assign this user to, if the above conditions are met. You can create multiple rules so a user can have multiple access groups.

For example, you may create a rule to assign users to the group 'Trucks' if the user's Licence Type equals 'Heavy Rigid'

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Step 4 - Activation

Up until this point the access groups are not yet active. That is, you can go ahead and set everything up without disrupting the users. When you are ready to activate:

1. Go to SysAdmin > Application Settings > Access Groups

2. Set Access groups enabled to Yes

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3. Underneath this setting, choose a method, either Explicit or Rules in Step 3 above.

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4. Click Save

Review 

Revisit SysAdmin > Manage Access Groups to see a count of how many vehicles are in each group, and how many users are in each group.