Note that this article touches on parts of the OpenSolar app that you may not be able to access if you do not have Admin permissions in your OpenSolar account. This article is targeted at OpenSolar users that have Admin access. 

OpenSolar gives you the ability to completely customise the areas of projects/control and the specific projects that each member of your team can access. This powerful tool allows you to customise OpenSolar to match your business process.

There are three main features that OpenSolar has created to allow you to better organise your team. 

1. Creation of Custom Role permissions
2. Creation of sales teams
3. Communication between roles

This article will take you through each of these features and describe how you can make the most of them. 

Custom Roles Permissions

OpenSolar gives you the ability to assign each user to a "Role".  A Role defines what access that user has to various parts of the OpenSolar app.  OpenSolar comes with 7 pre-defined roles (which you can read more about at the bottom of this article), but you can create a new custom role if none of the predefined roles suit your needs by going to Control>Company>Custom Roles. 

The steps to creating a new custom role: 

1. Navigate to Control>Company>Custom Roles and then click "Add Custom Role"
   
2. Give the role a title
   
3. (Optional) Choose a base template for the custom role, this will fill in the permissions based on the role you choose.  See "Description of Pre-Defined Roles" at the bottom of this article for more detail on the pre-defined roles you can base your custom roles on.
   
4. Configure their access to projects. By default (when the boxes are all unchecked), any role would only be able to access the projects that they are assigned to (plus any projects that their team is assigned to, more on creating sales teams here). These checkboxes give you the ability to allow a role to access all projects, contacts, activities etc. if that would better suit your business needs. 
   
5. After this you will be able to define the level of permission access for a number of different areas/fields in the app. You will be able to define whether the role can Create, View, Edit or Delete these fields/areas. Please note that for some fields/areas there may be some permissions which are not applicable and have been greyed out. 
   

Creation of sales teams

You also have the ability in OpenSolar to set up multi level sales teams by defining which users on your team can see which projects. By default, all users will be able to see the projects that they are assigned to, but you can also allow other users to see all the projects that someone else is assigned to. You can define this inside the user setting itself in Control>Company>Team>Edit. 

The way that it works is that any user that are listed inside the field labelled "Grant access to projects from these users" will mean that this user can access the projects that those users can access. 

Example of a 2 level project access setup: 

Salesperson can access 30 projects, because they are assigned to them. Inside a General Manager's user, in the "Grant access to projects from these users" field, that salesperson is added. That means that the General Manager can access those 30 projects (plus any that the General Manager would directly be assigned to). 

Example of a 3 level project access setup: 

Salesperson can access 30 projects, because they are assigned to them. Inside a Sales Manager's user settings, in the "Grant access to projects from these users" field, that salesperson is added. That means that the Sales Manager can access those 30 projects (plus any that the Sales Manager would directly be assigned to). Then on top of that, inside the General Manager's user settings, in the "Grant access to projects from these users" field, the Sales manager is added. This means that the General Manager can access any projects that the sales manager can access (which now includes the 30 projects that the salesperson can access + any that are assigned directly to the sales manager + any that are assigned directly to the general manager). 

 Managing trade pricing with distributors

Communication between roles

As well as the powerful functionality described above, OpenSolar has built the capability to allow better communications between users such as salespeople and designers by tagging each other on notes and activities on the project. 

We have also built fetchable tags which you can add to your projects which will allow a queue of projects to be made for whatever purposes you may need e.g. initial design or redesign. 

Communicating with notes/activities

This can be found inside a project on the manage page. You can add a note or activity and you can tag team members to be notified by your note or activity. Doing so will send an email to those team members letting them know about the contents of the note/activity and allowing them to quickly jump to the manage page.

The "Notify Team members" field will be pre populated with the following: 

• The user(s) that are assigned to the project
• Anyone who has already created a note or activity in the project

And you will be able to choose anyone from your organisation to add to that notify list who will also then receive an email when the note or activity is saved. 

Fetchable tags 

OpenSolar has implemented the ability for your team to create a design queue using our fetchabletags.

You can utilise this for many different uses such as Designers being able to fulfil requests from Salespeople like redesigns or initial designs etc. The way that this works is that a project can be tagged with a tag by going to the project info page > Sales & Marketing and then selecting a tag there.

If a fetchable tag is used then it means that this project will be added to the list of projects that can be viewed in the home page overview tab. You can click on the tag to fetch a project with that tag: 

You can set up the tags by going to Control>Company>Business process>Project tags>create or edit. 

You can then create a tag and you will be presented with a toggle to "Allow Fetch". Switching this ON will mean that you can use it for fetching. 

You will then be presented with two more tags, which are recommended to be turned ON. 

The first is "Remove tag when fetched" which means that when the tag is fetched, the tag will be removed which means that no one else will accidentally fetch it as well. Recommended to be turned ON. 

The second is "Create activity when fetched" which means that an activity will automatically be made and assigned to the person who fetched the project. This creates a record of who fetched it. It is recommended to be turned ON. 

Description of pre-defined roles

OpenSolar has created seven pre-defined roles which have been created to easily set up your team permissions to save you time going through each of the permissions and creating custom roles.  If you push to create a custom role, you can start from scratch, or you can start from one of these pre-defined roles and adjust it.

The following tables provide a general overview (fist table) and a very detailed description (second table) of the permissions associated with each role.