CLIFF supports a simple hierarchical organizational structure comprised of organization, group, office, and users as shown in the following chart.
The Organization is the highest organizational unit in CLIFF. It encompasses your CLIFF configuration and all your data. Your company or 'organization' may have several CLIFF databases, but they all run as individual CLIFF Organizations. You may exchange Referrals and Logs with other CLIFF organizations.
Groups are an optional organizational level which allow you to group Offices for reporting purposes. Groups may equate to Divisions in your Company where each Division may have multiple Offices. A group may be comprised of several offices, but an office can only belong to a single Group. An Office does not have to be assigned to a Group.
Offices are the primary organizational component in CLIFF and are used to establish ownership of Logs, and create Referrals. Offices should reflect your organizational structure, for example you may define Offices for Marketing, Sales, Purchasing, and so on. When defining your offices keep in mind what you are tracking and the required actions for each Log -- Referrals are sent to an Office, not a User. For example if you are tracking correspondence you may forward the correspondence to other departments to prepare a response, but the response requires the President to sign it. In this case you would define Offices for each Department that would write a response, plus the President's office so you can track the status of signed responses.
Office Notes:
Logs are owned by Offices. The Office that creates a Log can impose access restrictions (for other Offices) to the Log.
Do not create Offices to categorize Logs, for example if tracking correspondence do not create offices for letter, fax, email, etc. The Log Type is designed to do this.
If you wish to assign tasks to other users, then you must create an office for each group of people that you would assign tasks to. Note that an office can have many users, or just a single user.
Make your office names meaningful. If you want to associate office names in lists then use a common prefix. For example, the marketing division in a company may have separate offices for each product. To keep their offices together in lists, the company could name their offices MKT:Product A, MKT:Product B, MKT:Product C, and so on.
