The devices in an organisation may be different in their settings and the applications that they contain. For example, the mobile device of a technician may have very different applications to that of the company CEO. For this purpose, the devices may belong to any number of device groups that can be set up for the organization.

Typical groups would be:

• Organisational units (solutions, services, customer care, R&D, sales, marketing, etc)
• Job roles (support personnel, technician, cook, manager, etc)
• Locations
• Languages
• Ownership and management policy of the device (BYOD, CYOD, COPE, or COBO)

You can use device groups for a number of purposes:

• For filtering devices in the Devices→Inventory view, for viewing devices or executing tasks. You could, for example, list all devices held by service personnel, check that they all have the latest version of an app installed, or send an SMS message to them.
• For restricting device compliance rules in Devices→Compliance to only apply to specified groups, as described in Device Compliance

Notice that the device groups are different and completely separate from how users are grouped into organisational units. The organisational grouping has some different properties, such as that it is not overlapping.

Device groups are defined in Devices→Groups.

The group membership is defined in device settings in Devices→Inventory and default settings for new devices in device templates in Devices→Templates. You could, for example, have a group for company managers and then a device template for their devices.

You are free to create as many of these groups that is necessary and practical for your organisation's use. The main idea is to have as many groups as there are different basic device setups for a phone in the organisation.

You should also set up a separate device group for each of these groups.

Creating a New Group

To create a new group:

1. Click New in the view toolbar
2. Fill in the form:
   
   The fields are as follows:
   

   Display name (mandatory)

   Name for the group

   Description (optional)

   Free-form description of the group

   Singleton set name (optional)

   You can assign a group to a singleton set that defines a set of mutually exclusive groups, denoted with a letter A to Z, as described below.

3. Click Save to save the new group or Cancel to abort without saving

Singleton Sets

You can assign a device group to a singleton set that defines a set of mutually exclusive groups. A device can only belong to one group in such a singleton set. Singleton sets are named with an uppercase letter from A to Z.

For example, in the illustration above, we have assigned groups "Management", "Sales", and "Delivery" to the singleton set "D" (department), so a device can only belong to one of them.

The singleton sets are used when you edit the group membership in device settings, either for a device or device template. The singleton set is indicated with the set letter in parentheses.

If the device or template has group membership in more than one of the groups in the same singleton set, an error is displayed when you try to save the device or template.

Editing a Group

To edit an already existing group account:

1. Select the group in the list and click Edit
2. The Editing group pop-up window opens
3. See above for detailed information about the fields
4. Finally, click either Save to save the group or Cancel to exit without saving.

Removing Groups

To remove a group from the system:

1. Select the group in the list and click Remove
2. You will be prompted to confirm the removal