Federated accounts
Over the coming weeks we will be introducing a new feature we call 'federated accounts'.
This will enable you, as account holders, to invite other users to manage individual buildings within your account and/or to have read-only, guest access to your entire account.
We will be introducing a number of roles, each with different permissions.
As existing account holders you will become 'business owners'. Business owners have complete, read and write access to the account, exactly as you do now. In addition, you will have the ability to invite 'building managers' or 'guests'. (If you don't plan on monitoring many buildings and delegating the management of those buildings to others, don't worry, you'll still be able to use your existing account as normal.)
Building managers can only view and edit the buildings they manage, unless they also have guest access.
Guests can view, but not edit, any building within your account.
As a business owner, you need only add a new building to your account and then invite a colleague to set up meters and enter weekly readings for that building. You can allow a manager to manage any number of buildings, or indeed allow any number of managers to manage the same building, in any combination.
Two questions:
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At this stage, we plan to give guests access to the entire account, rather than individual buildings. You'll be able to restrict which buildings managers have editing rights over, but not viewing rights if you also make them a guest. Guests can view all buildings. Is this too simplistic? Would you want to be able to restrict which buildings guests have access to?
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Is there information such as money spend, or comments attached to individual meter readings you would want to hide from guests? Or from building managers?
Please let us know.
Any other feedback welcome. In particular, please let us know if generally you would find the federated accounts functionality useful (or not). If you'd be interested in testing federated accounts before we make this functionality available to all please contact us at support@smeasure.org.uk
Thanks,
The SMEasure team
2 Posted by ric.baker on 18 Nov, 2009 05:35 PM
Hi
I am using Smeasure for a single building and we have multiple tenants. It would be very useful for me to be able to invite them to view the charts without any editing rights. I think it would be easier to manage if it was possible to hide some or all individual meter reading sets from some or all guests.
Thanks
Richard
Support Staff 3 Posted by Rob Bevan on 19 Nov, 2009 05:58 PM
Thanks for the feedback Richard.
How granular do you think this would need to be? Would you want to hide particular individual readings, or ranges of readings, or all those belonging to a particular meter?
Would you also want those readings/meters be excluded from the graphs?
4 Posted by ric.baker on 20 Nov, 2009 01:45 PM
Hi Rob
Put simply - for electricity use, this building has six separately metered areas that could be occupied by six different tenants. It would be best if they could see their own use and the total use but not their neighbours individual figures.
The gas use is a single meter for the whole building and any breakdown is by proportion of the total.
In the first instance it would be good just to let the tenants see the Charts without any readings. I have already produced a few screen shots of the charts to show them what I am doing with all these meter readings.
Support Staff 5 Posted by Rob Bevan on 23 Nov, 2009 10:32 AM
Thanks, that's a useful example.
I don't think initially we'd be looking to allow guest access to individual meters, only to buildings, but we could provide a setting that would allow you to hide all meters and readings from all guests (your 'first instance').
6 Posted by goatspice on 14 Dec, 2009 04:57 PM
Hi Rob, I would say guests should be able to see either a single building or a set of buildings chosen by the business owner or of course all, but definetly not all by default, as that will be the wrong way of looking at it. I would rather have to allow them access one building at the time than to all. But for it to work best it will have to be possible to choose and of course change those options for each individual "guest" account. For example - I create a guest account for the CEO or a board member who wants to se all buildings, but create one for just a couple of buildings for a particular manager who is keen how it is working out at the places where he's encharged....
Y,
Support Staff 7 Posted by Rob Bevan on 16 Dec, 2009 07:30 AM
We hadn't planned to offer that degree of control over what a guest can have access to, but I can see that limiting guest access to particular buildings would be useful, so we'll definitely consider this. Thanks for the feedback.
8 Posted by lisa.pasquale on 10 May, 2010 02:09 PM
My take is, it would be useful if there was guest viewing access of individual buildings. This would allow the buildings we're monitoring to be viewed by their respective teachers & pupils, council reps, & school heads and administrators, without them viewing all the other schools we're monitoring. It will be hard to maintain the school's support for contributing to this if they cannot have guest access to their buildings for multiple users.
the guest access is better on the building-level. But, the "owner" (or account administrator) needs to be able to add multiple administrators or sub-administrators. We're looking to track about 4-dozen buildings, and it would- one of our staff working nearly full-time administering this, unless we can allow multiple employees to set up buildings and assign managers.
The costing, right now, we'd prefer to hide from building managers, because we can't assign them individual rates yet, and they all pay different rates. So those will misalign with their bills, and might turn them off to contributing to the system.