March 25 will see the launch of the latest update to MAX RM. The highlight of the new release will be the introduction of our first User Roles & Permissions feature, called Client Groups.

Client Groups lets you create your own client lists that you can save and then apply to your users, ensuring that they only see the customers you want them to manage when they log into the MAX RM Dashboard. This helps with security and quality control, as there’s less chance of your technicians accidentally turning a feature on or off for a customer that’s not under their management.

What does this really mean for you?

• More Secure
  You’re only giving users access to the clients they are meant to look after instead of having to give everyone access to all your clients.

• More Efficient
  Users don’t have to filter their way through long lists of clients to find the ones that are theirs, making their jobs easier with a more focused Dashboard.

• Better Operations Management
  You can set your Dashboard up to match your support organisation, instead of having to compromise your support organisation to match the Dashboard, and reduce the likelihood of unintentional changes to client settings.

Looking ahead

This is our first update around User Roles & Permissions, and we’re already working on phase two, which will allow you to set the features users can access. You’ll be able to combine this with Client Groups for granular control of individual user accounts. We look forward to bringing you this next update to User Roles & Permissions soon!

All the details…

For now, here’s a detailed run-through of the Client Groups feature:

1) Go to the Settings menu, then select Client Groups (1) to open up the Client Groups dialog.
2) Create a new Client Group: click “Add Client Group” (2), then pick the clients from the list you want to add to the Group. Multiselect with CTRL+Click or Shift+Click, then click the arrow or drag-and-drop the selection into the new Client Group (3). Click Save when you’re done.

3) You can add, edit and delete Client Groups as needed. Changes to Groups automatically apply to your users when they next login (NB: They need to log out and in again, refreshing the browser alone isn’t sufficient). If you want to delete a Client Group you first have to make sure no users are using that Group. There’s also an “All Clients” Group which can’t be deleted.

4) Now you’ve created a Client Group you can add it to a user. In the Settings dropdown menu, select Edit Users. In the dialog, click in the new Client Group column to select the desired Group for a user (4). You can also select Manage groups to quickly jump to the Client Groups dialog to edit a Group (5). Repeat this step for any other users, then click Save to apply the Client Groups.
5) Of course you still have all the other functionality of the previous Edit Users dialog: right-click a user or select User (6) to bring up the Set Password and Reset Password options.
6) To see Client Groups in action, log into the Dashboard as a user with a Client Group. You’ll now only see the selected clients in the client tree and their associated devices. The name of the Client Group is shown at the top of the tree so you can easily tell which Group you’re using (7).

7) You can only make changes for the clients in your Group, for example in the “Edit Checks Like This” (8) dialog or in the various feature settings trees (9). Please note that in the settings trees you can’t apply a feature setting at the Server or Workstation level, you have to select one of your clients within the tree.

A final couple of points:

• As mentioned, users have to log off and log in again to see Client Groups take effect, not just refresh their browser.

• When you add a new client, this client is automatically added to the All Clients group and to the Group you’re in as a user.

• Client Groups currently don’t apply to the reports in the Dashboard. When a user with a Client Group goes to run a report, they’ll be able to see and select other clients.

• Client Groups don’t apply to the Asset Tracking section, users will be able to see all clients in this area of the Dashboard.

• A user with Superuser access is able to log into the Dashboard and change their Client Group off their own accord. You’ll be able to restrict this when we add feature access controls in the next User Roles & Permissions update.

Let us know what you think

We’re hard at work on our next User Roles & Permissions update, in the meantime we hope the Client Groups feature offers you a major first enhancement. Please continue to let us know how we’re doing and what else you think we should do to User Roles & Permissions to make them even more useful.

And finally…

Full release notes are listed below:

Staging Release Notes

Please note, staging release notes are subject to change. Final release notes will go out with the release.

Summary for Service Release

• Service Release focused on new features, bug fixes and performance
• Dashboard v5.58
• No agent update in this release

Dashboard v5.58

FEATURE: Apply Client Groups to users so they can only see and administer selected clients
BUGFIX: Ensure changes to the Client Report Settings in the Edit Client dialog are saved correctly
BUGFIX: Performance enhancement to the Add/Edit/Delete Checks Like This dialog to ensure it loads more quickly