Team Hierarchy

Teams are based on a hierarchical structure. In the team hierarchy, a higher level team is called the parent team. The Global Team is the highest-level parent team. Sub-teams of a team are called child teams. Teams must contain at least one user, and can contain both broadcast and escalation groups.

Teams can be combined with permissions to tightly control the actions individuals can perform and the information they can view. For example, one team leader might be granted permission to send notifications and another team leader permission to manage public data for team members.

Team leaders carry their permissions in the parent team to a child team through inheritance. An exception to inheritance occurs when the leader is explicitly added to a sub-team. In this case you can remove permissions.

Team Hierarchy Example

Republic Bank has three regional offices, each of which has its own manager and support staff. Each region includes three branch offices. In addition, Republic Bank uses cross-regional teams to address areas of concern to all employees such as disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

To control access to employee data, Republic Bank creates a team for each region, and then creates sub-teams for each branch. Each branch manager is made a team leader for his branch and is granted permission to send notifications to his branch. He does not have permission to send notifications to other branches in his region or in other regions.

The regional managers are leaders of regional teams, which contain the branch teams. The regional manager is a team leader for his region and can send notifications to all of the branch sub-teams in his region. He cannot send notifications to branches that are outside of his region.

In addition, Republic Bank creates a disaster recovery team. This team consists of one member from each branch. The leader of the disaster recovery team has permission to send notifications to the disaster recovery team only.

The Global Team leader can send notifications to everyone.