NetChecklist.com Managing Users Video

This video explains how to manage the users of your organization in the NetChecklist.com online task management application. It explains how to make users members of your organization and how to remove users from membership in your organization. It also explains assigning user rights to the members of your organization.

Video Transcript - Managing Users Within the Task Management Application NetChecklist.com

Hi, welcome to another video tutorial on the web application NetChecklist.com. In this video I'm going to talk about how to manage users within organizations.

Here again I'm logged in as my fictional user Bob Broker.

The most important thing to understand about user accounts within this application, is that a user's account is not tied to any individual organization they user might be a member of. A user, using a single log in account can be a member of an unlimited number of organizations and an organization can have an unlimited number of members. If a user is removed from being a member of an organization the only effect that will have on their user account will be that they'll no longer have any access to the organization they were removed from - they'll still be able to log in and they'll still be able to access any other organizations they're still a member of. As a matter of fact, even if a user wasn't a member of any organization at all, they would still be able to log in to the application - they wouldn't be able to do much once they got there but they could still log in.

Not only can a user be a member of multiple organizations, their level of user rights can vary from organization to organization. A user can be an administrator of one organization with very broad rights to create, change and delete things within that organization and the same user can be a limited user within another organization with very few rights to do anything within that organization.

One way we can see evidence of this is by taking a quick look at this user's user settings by clicking on the link here at the top of the page and keep in mind that at this point we're not working within any organization. Here we see his first and last name, the email address he uses to log in and his "User Access Code". A user's access code is different than their password and we'll come back to exactly what that's used for in just a minute. He can set the time zone he's working in and his preferred default task sort order. He can also change his log in password by clicking here.

Notice that what we don't see here is anything about his user role or the level of permissions he has. The reason that's not here is that because a user's role can vary for each organization they're a member of the user's role isn't set in the user's settings, that is set in the "Manage Users" settings for each organization they're a member of.

Let's go to the "Manage Users" page for this organization and remember that we won't see this button unless you're working in a particular organization and we also won't see this button if we aren't logged in as a user who is an administrator an owner of the organization we're working in. On this page we can see all of the users who are members of this organization and by selecting any of them we can see what their role is within this organization and can change their role if we want to.

To demonstrate how this all works, I'm going to remove one of our users from this organization by selecting the "Remove User From Organization". Before we can do this however, the application needs to know who to reassign to any uncompleted tasks assigned to the user we're removing to and this must be another user who is a member of our organization. If we wanted to assign this user's tasks to more than one other members of the organization we would either need to do that before we come here to remove them or assign them all to one user here and then reassign them to other users as desired. This will also reassign any items assigned to the user we're deleting on any of this organization's checklists. Remember that items on a checklist aren't on the actual task list yet - they get copied to the task list each time the checklist is copied but if a task on a checklist is assigned to particular member of the organization then that will get assigned to that person every time that checklist is copied. Once we've done this, we click the button to remove the user from our organization and then we're asked to confirm that we want to remove this user from our organization and once we do then this user is removed. The application gives us a confirmation that this user has been removed from the organization and it will also tell us if there were any tasks assigned to that other user that we specified.

Now lets go back and make this user a member of our organization again and we can do this by selecting the "Add User to Org" button here at the top of the page. In order make a user a member of our organization, we must know two things about their user account - the email address they use to log in and their "User Access Code". Remember I mentioned the "User Access Code" a few minutes ago and I said we'd come back to it so here we are.

A user's access code is different than their password and it's what allows an organization to make someone a member of that organization and it's also what prevents someone from making someone a member of their organization without the user's permission. It explains that right down here at the bottom of the page. You should never give anyone your password but you can give someone your access code if you want to allow them to make you a member of their organization. Without both of these pieces of information we can't add a user to our organization. When we make a user a member of our organization we must also specify what that user's role will be within our organization.

Once we've got all of the these things set, we'll just click the button that says "Add User to Org" and we see the message that the user has been added successfully and we also see that they now show up in our list of users on the right. If we select her in the list on the right we see that she has been added as a standard user. Once the new user has been added to an organization, they'll also show up in all of the drop down boxes that let you assign tasks and other things to users who are members of the organization.

Now, it's important to understand that once we've made a user a member of our organization that user can then go and change their "User Access Code" and it's probably a good idea for them to do change it so that whoever they gave their access code to no longer knows it. Changing the user's access code once they've been made a member of an organization will not affect their membership in that organization, it only has to match when the addition is actually made - after that it doesn't matter if it's changed and it's actually a good idea to change it.

If we want to change a user's level of permission within an organization, that's very easy to do too. All we have to do is select that user from the list and then change their permission in the drop down menu and then click "Change User's Role".

So that's all there is to managing users of organizations within this application.