NetSetMan Support

jwitthus

Member

Registered: 2015-07-21

Posts: 2

Group Management

I have been using the groups to organize my networks based on customer sites. Most groups contain 3 or 4 networks but I'm starting to get too many groups to manage easily.

I have two ideas that would make this easier.
1. Be able to import/export by group. This way when a job is complete I can export the group and delete it. Then if I need to go back for a service trip I can import the group back in.
2. Be able to enable/disable groups. I like that I can enable the different networks within a group with a checkbox. Something similar to this with the groups could be useful. I'd like it if the groups don't show up in the dropdown box or the tray menu when disabled.

Thanks,

Joel

NetSetMan Support

Administrator

Registered: 2005-08-06

Posts: 1,878

Re: Group Management

Thanks for sharing your ideas!

1. Exporting/importing groups
Indeed, this could be useful in some cases.
But we need to take care not to "break" the usability pattern. If we simply add two additional items in the main menu where you already can ex-/import single profiles it might get confusing. While "Import profile" overwrites the settings of the currently visible profile, "Import group" probably shouldn't overwrite the current group but instead should be added as an additional group. It's usually a bad idea to have similar items that do things differently. We'll have to think thoroughly about it.

2. Enabling/disabling groups
I don't think this would be used by many people, but I understand that it might be helpful in some specific constellations. So usually the way to approach something like this is to visually leave everything as it is, adding the optional functionality in a non-intrusive way. While adding an additional checkbox in front of the group name in the Profile Management seems to be an obvious way, it would break this approach. Instead I could imagine automatically hiding the group (in the tray, compact mode and combobox) if all profiles are disabled. To ease this there could be a right-click context menu for groups in the profile management to enable/disable all containing profiles, so one doesn't have to click 6 times.
Would that help?

jwitthus

Member

Registered: 2015-07-21

Posts: 2

Re: Group Management

I like your idea to disable a group if all the profiles are disabled. I wouldn't need the option to disable them all through the right-click menu but I could see that being helpful at times. Either way being able to hide the group from the tray menu was my main hope and I think this solves it perfectly.

As for exporting a group I can see how that could become confusing. I'll go through how I saw myself using this and maybe you'll see a better solution. I work as a controls engineer and create a group for each job. Within this group there is usually 1-2 controls networks I need to access along with the mill's ethernet that has access to the internet. I also like to add the hotel internet as another network and then use the notes to store all the passwords to these different networks. My hope with the export was to be able to save this entire setup in with the all my other customer files so if I need to return to that site later I can restore all this information quickly. This would also help if someone else returns to site in my place they could download this file from our servers and have all the network information they need to get up and running quickly. The only thing I can think of to try to avoid confusion is to add the export functionality to the group/profile management page so it is separate from the other export function. This still doesn't solve the issue of having similar functions that operate differently however.