Windchill Groups
Windchill has two types of groups:
• User-defined groups are those groups created and managed by the users of a Windchill solution. These groups can be created through the Participant Administration utility or can be created through a third party LDAP tool. The user creating the group has the option to choose to create such a group either in the LDAP directory server or in the database. If the group has been created in the LDAP server, a corresponding UFID is created maintained in the LDAP.
• System groups are created and managed internally by the system and do not have a corresponding UFID. Windchill uses system groups for managing context team membership and other system activities.
Additionally, dynamic roles represent the system groups that are used in managing context team membership. Dynamic roles can be participants in access control policy rules. For additional information, see
About Dynamic Role Use in Access Control Rules.
Organizing users into user-defined groups provides you with a more efficient way to apply policies for access control and event notification, to populate participants in team and life cycle roles, and to populate recipients of workflow tasks. Each user-defined group object identifies selected users, organizations, and possibly other groups, under one name. You can create user-defined groups so that you can efficiently apply administrative tasks to groups of users, rather than to each user individually.
User-defined groups are associated with the context in which they are created. Some
Windchill solutions also create and manage system groups that are used to manage team role membership. These groups are not accessible from the Participant Administration utility. For more information on accessing groups from the Participant Administration utility, see
Using the Participant Administration Utility.
A Windchill user-defined group object holds the group name, the UFID associated with the group, the Windchill domain of the group, and administrative flags that are set if the object needs to be repaired or is disabled. The UFID contains the distinguished name of the user-defined group and identifies the directory service where user-defined group entry resides.