Impact of data domain segmentation

When you create or edit records, you might make a change that results in an update to the data domain assignment and removes your authorization to view the records (for example, changing the owner of a record assigns the owner's data domains to the record, or changing the location assigns a different group due to a business rule running in the background). This can occur in the following situations:

• Updating records

  • If you are updating a single record and you change a field that affects the data domain assignment, the Health Indicator (the light bulb icon ) displays a number (or increments an existing number), indicating that there is a new message--in this case an information message. This occurs in both the record page itself and in the Preview pane. The relevant message for this action indicates that saving the record will remove your authorization to view that changed record.

    Note Messages in the Health Indicator appear in the order of severity--first error, then warning, and then information messages.

  • If you are updating multiple records in the Preview pane, Service Management does not display any information message before you save, and only informs you after you have saved the records that you have made a change that removes your authorization to view one or more of those changed records.

  In both cases, saving the records causes the record list to be refreshed, and removes the unauthorized records from the current view.

• Creating records

  If you create a new record and assign a data domain to it which you do not have authorization to view, you receive the information message, but when you save it, the record does not appear in the list of records that you are permitted to view.

The ability to view search results is limited by the data domains assigned to the records.

Since a record's history is part of each record, the ability to view that history is limited by the data domains assigned to the record.

Since comments are part of each record, the ability to view comments is limited by the data domains assigned to the record.

New knowledge or news articles (either manually created or as the result of creating an article from another record) automatically have the Public data domain assigned to them.

Agents cannot move articles that have data domain assignments to the External phase, nor can agents assign data domains to articles that are currently in the External phase.

The visibility of task nodes in a task plan is limited to the data domains assigned to those tasks. For example, an organization can use data domain segmentation to separate access to different types of employee records. Users in data domain X, dealing with employee absences and vacations, would not have access to the task and task plans of data domain Y, dealing with payroll.

The automatic tasks in a task plan obtains their running scope permissions from the administrator who designed the task plan, not the person who is currently assigned to a particular ticket.

When viewing a task plan from the parent record's page, if a user is not permitted to perform a certain task, only the task's progress can be viewed, and it will not be possible for that user to click on the record to view its page, or to see other details about the task.

A user who has permission to view the parent record can also view the task plan summary, as well as everything related to planning or the status of the parent record. However, this user may not have permission to view the details of all tasks.

When viewing the task queue, the parent record of a task is hidden from a user if the user does not have permission to view that parent record.

You can use a processing rule in notifications to hide the record name from users who do not have permission to see records of that type. For more information, see Hide record name rule.

An approval task obtains its data domain in a similar way to other tasks.

• If a task is assigned to a person, that person can view the approval even if they are not authorized to view other records in that data domain.

• If a task is delegated to a person, that person can only view the approval if they are authorized in that data domain.

For operational reports, the data reflected in the report depends on the data domains assigned to the user viewing the report. Two users with different assigned data domains who are viewing the same operational report will see reports based on different data.

For analytic and survey reports, the report is based on data from the data domains assigned to the user who created the report. A user assigned the same data domains or more can view the report. A user assigned fewer data domains than the one who created the report is not able to view the report (it appears in the Report list but cannot be accessed).

If you select Duplicate to create a duplicate of the analytic or survey report, the new report is visible and it is based on data from the data domains assigned to you.

Data domain assignment has no effect on items in the Service Portal. Only entitlement rules are used in the Service Portal to limit visibility of items to specific audiences.

The ability to view Hot topic analytics is limited by the data domains assigned to the record.