Several customers were asking for more control over what users are able to see and do inside the program, and the latest improvement to the application provides a solution.

Before describing the update, I'd like to make a quick introduction. Patrick Thurmod has joined our team as a web developer. He's located here at the DLT office in Kansas City. He will be sharing the responsibility of maintaining and improving the code and he's already been a big help. Patrick did a great deal of the coding for this update and almost all of the testing.

The application did allow users to be in groups before, but the functionality was very limited. Now every user belongs to a group and groups can be placed inside of other groups. There's no limit to the number of levels of group nesting, so we should be able to handle even the most complicated organizational structures.

When you create users now (or when you ask an admin to create them for you), you can set up permissions for the user. If you like, you can allow the user to only see the shipments that they themselves created. Or maybe they can view all shipments created by people in their group, but they can only edit their own shipments. You could also set up users who can see all shipments in the company, but can only edit shipments in their group. And you will probably want some users who can view and edit all shipments in the company. Before this update, all users could see all shipments in their company. So, all users will be given permission to view and edit all shipments initially. Customers who want their existing users changed to take advantage of the new permission system will need to request the change.

Admin users will be able to create users and groups in a newly designed form and rearrange users and groups by dragging and dropping. Customers with no admin access can simply email us a description of how they want their company set up.

Normal users will probably only notice one main change from this update. If their company has groups set up and the user has permission to view shipments in more than one of those group, then they will see a new link at the top of the Tracing page: "Groups". Hold your mouse over this word and you can drill down to the groups you have permission to view. Click on the name of a group and the list of shipments will update and only show shipments that belong to that group (and its sub-groups).

Permissions are also applied on the Reports page. The reports will only include information about shipments that the user has permission to view.