As a Rollbase user you may have noticed that four new Object definitions have recently appeared in your account: Location, Department, Function and Group. In addition, as of last week a new Organization Management application has been published to the Application Directory to provide a simple way to manage these new features.
The Location, Department and Function objects are somewhat special new objects in Rollbase. Not only do they allow you full control over fields, pages, views, workflow, etc (as with any other object definition in Rollbase), they also come with special hierarchical view components providing an easy way to visualize the structure of any sized organization -- whether you are managing a small business are a global company with over 10,000 employees.
By enabling the new "Organization" attribute in any of your object definitions, you can assign data records to specific positions in any of these hierarchies. This in turn determines who can access these records based on what Groups your users are assigned to.
The Group object is also a new object definition with some unique capabilities, the most important of which is its capability to restrict specific portions of the Location, Department and Function hierarchies that a set of users can have access to. 
For example you might create different Groups for Sales Managers in US, Canada, APAC, EMEA, etc. While users assigned to these Groups may have the same Role and User-specific permissions, they will only be able to access data associated with different portions of the hierarchies based on their Group asignments.
Each user can be assigned to any number of Groups (you will now see a new "Groups" picklist associated with your User object definition for this purpose). In this way you can model complex organizational structures and leverage these structures to segment data access for tens, hundreds and even thousands of users in an intuitive, scalable, and easy to manage way. The below screenshot shows an example hierarchy of Functions in a fictitious organization:
It is helpful to think of Groups as a way to restrict access to any Rollbase data for a particular set of users before any Role and User specific permissions are applied. With these additions there are now several layers of permission management available to enable very simple as well as more sophisticated, larger-scale Rollbase implementations.
All of this functionality is now available to every Rollbase user and has been automatically added to your account using our new Managed Applications capabilities. For any users wishing to explore this further, we recommend installing the Organization Management application into your account.
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