Group hierarchy and inheritance

Groups are organized in a hierarchical structure. There are 8 group types, each of which has a certain weight, or place in the hierarchy.

The hierarchical weight of each group type is as follows:

These weights are used for determining the inheritance of individual settings. This is best illustrated with an example.

Say you have created the following groups and settings (see Adding groups for instructions how to do this):

Now say that two new devices are added to the DME system: A Nokia E72 belonging to a sales representative in the UK, and an iPhone 4 running iOS 5.1 in France. This is the way in which DME will apply settings to these two devices:

Thus, the two phones get a different set of settings because they are automatically arranged in different groups. Since the Platform group has greater weight than the Default group, the Disable calendar push setting will overwrite the default setting on the iPhone. You can say that settings in a group with greater hierarchical weight overwrites the same setting in a group with a lower weight.

In case of directory groups, a device can be member of two directory groups with conflicting settings. For instance, a device can be member of both a Sales LDAP group and a UK LDAP group. In this case, the hierarchical weight issue is determined by assigning a priority to each directory group in the window Group priority. For more information, see Directory group priority.

The "heaviest" weight is the device itself - making settings on an individual device overrides all other settings. To "flush" any settings made in heavier groups or for the device itself, you can choose to lock the settings at a lower (lighter) level. This means that the settings made on the lighter levels will overwrite settings on heavier levels, unless they themselves are locked. This way, you can for instance make sure that a specific setting is the same for all devices in the system. For more information about this, see Default settings.