Security Guide for Siebel eBusiness Applications > Configuring Access Control > Access Control Mechanisms >

About Access-Group Access Control

Access groups are used to control access to master data by diverse groups of party types.

For information about administering access-group access control, see Implementing Access-Group Access Control.

An access group is a collection of any combination of positions, organizations, account, households, and user lists. Its members are instances of party types other than Person—that is, its members cannot be individual people. For example, an access group could consist of several partner organizations and user lists to which you want to grant access to a particular set of your sales tools.

NOTE:  Although you can add divisions to access groups, doing so has no effect on visibility. Use organizations instead.

A user is associated with an access group if, during the current session, the user is associated with a position, organization, account, household, or user list that is a member of the access group.

You can create hierarchies of access groups. An access group can belong to only one access group hierarchy. That is, an access group can have only one parent access group. For example, the access group mentioned above might belong to a hierarchy of access groups for the purpose of granting differing levels of access to sales tools.

You can grant access groups access to catalogs and categories of master data: products, literature, solutions, resolution items, decision issues, events, training courses, and competitors. For example, branches in the access group hierarchy above could be granted access to categories in a hierarchical catalog in which each category contains sales literature and decision issue items. For an illustration of an access group hierarchy (master data), see Access Control for Data.

A category of master data can contain any combination of master data items. You can only control access to catalogs and categories of master data. You cannot control access to individual master data items using access-group access control.

When access groups are associated with a catalog or with categories in the catalog, you can apply access-group access control. You can control access to the data in one of the following ways:

• Group. While in a given category, the user sees either a list of the category's first-level subcategories (child categories) to which he or she has access or all the data records in the current category, depending on the applet being used. If the user is at the catalog level, the user sees the first-level categories.
• Catalog. The user sees a flat list of all the data in categories across all catalogs to which the user has access. This access control type is typically used in product picklists and other lists of products, such as a recommended product list.

For more information about data and data categorization, see Access Control for Data.

For more information about parties, see Access Control for Parties.