Common Organization Structures and Best Practices

This article provides insight into typical organizational structures leveraged by various Documoto customers to best meet the needs of their business and the customers they service. Your business may or may not fit into one of these typical structures. However, these guidelines will provide a series of best practice recommendations to allow you to configure Documoto organizations and associated content access controls to best suit your needs.

Article Topics

• What is an Organization?
• Access Controls
• Creating an Organization
• Customer/Dealer Based Organization Structure
• Location Based Organization Structure
• Role Based Organization Structure

What is an Organization?

Before administrators begin creating new organizations under a tenant, they should first understand the purpose of organizations. Organizations are generally used for three different reasons:

1. Separate Content: Due to the fact that access controls to books and media items are set by organization, one of the main purposes for creating unique organizations is to ensure that content can be separated and made available to the appropriate users.
2. Pricing Structures & Currency Localization: When Documoto customers indicate that they have different pricing structures for different dealers or customers they will typically need to manage the different pricing structures under different organization levels. Additionally, specific currency codes can be configured or customized for each organization.
3. Customization: If Documoto customers would like to customize the Documoto user-interface with dealer logos or PO/RFQ forms, they must setup unique organizations for the customized branding and shopping cart content. 

Access Controls

Access controls allow a publisher to set who can see content, such as a book or other media items, in the Documoto library. In order for a media to be viewable in the Documoto library, it must have both organizations and media categories configured in its access controls settings. 

Creating an Organization

Your organization structure within Documoto is key to ensure the right content is delivered to the right people. In Documoto, organizations can be, and often are, your customers. However, they can also be used to provide different pricing models, prevent certain users from ordering parts altogether, or change the look and feel of a printed parts book. 

One key concept with organizations is that of ‘reverse inheritance’. The access controls for an organization are set at the lowest organization ("child organization") in the organizational hierarchy. Those controls are then inherited upwards by the child organization's parents. This is opposite of what many new users to Documoto may think and is important to keep this in mind as you are building out their tenant's organization structure.

It is worth spending some time to consider what type of structure will best meet your needs before creating anything in Documoto. We recommend building a organizational diagram to better visualize how your proposed structure will affect access controls, pricing, content access and branding of printed parts books. Once you are satisfied with the design and have validated it against your requirements you can log into Documoto as an administrator and build out the organizational structure using your diagram as a roadmap.

For more detailed information on creating organizations, please refer to: How to Create and Manage Organizations. 

Customer/Dealer Based Organization Structure

When to Use This: when you want to restrict access of your parts catalogs and parts information to your individual customer or dealer.

For example; if your pricing model is different for different customers and / or they each have unique or limited parts catalogs that you do not want other customers to see. This is the most common organizational structure we see used by Documoto customers.

Location Based Organization Structure

When to Use This: when you want to restrict access of your parts catalogs and part information to specific geographical locations.

An example would be an equipment manufacturer for urban light rail. They typically have engineers and technicians that specialize in specific functional systems such as signals or transformers. When these technicians need to look up parts and assemblies it is normally within their respective area of expertise and based on a specific sub-station or point on the rail line.

Role Based Organization Structure

When to Use This: when you want to restrict access of your parts catalogs and part information to specific roles within your customer or dealership base.

An example would be an equipment manufacturer that has several dealers with well-defined roles that require access to different parts books or manuals dependent on their job function.