Understanding Departments & Groups in ConexED

 Overview

Every service your staff deliver through ConexED — advising, tutoring, financial aid, career services, and more — is organized using two building blocks: Departments and Groups. Understanding how these two levels relate to each other, and where administrative access is granted, is the single most important concept for configuring ConexED correctly.

This article explains what Departments and Groups actually are in ConexED, how administrative access flows between them, and how to decide whether to organize your institution's service areas broadly or narrowly.

At a Glance

• A Group is where the actual work happens: appointments, drop-ins, forms, reason codes, and settings are all configured at the group level.
• A Department is a container that organizes related Groups together for administrative and reporting purposes.
• Every Group must belong to a Department — there is no way to create a standalone Group.
• Administrative access flows down from Department to Group automatically: a Department Director is automatically granted admin access to every Group inside their Department, with no separate step required.
• Almost none of the settings covered elsewhere in this KB category — Locations, Forms, Reason Codes, No Show Alerts, kiosk settings — have a Department-level version. They are configured per Group, every time.
• Departments also surface in the Student Support Directory — the browsable staff listing available to students and campus visitors. Staff members appear under their Group's Department, and visitors can filter the listing by Department or by individual Group.

Please note: "Department" does not mean what you might expect - This is the most common point of confusion for new ConexED administrators, so it's worth calling out clearly before anything else.

In ConexED, a Department is a service delivery container — a way of grouping related Groups together, similar to how a Library Director oversees several library service points. It has no built-in relationship to your institution's actual academic or organizational departments.

For example, a college might set up a ConexED Department called "Tutoring" that contains four separate Groups: Math, Science, Academic Coaching, and Nursing. The person who administers that ConexED Department is called a Department Director — but this role has nothing to do with being the head of an academic department like Nursing or Math. It simply means they administer that particular service delivery unit inside ConexED.

This naming overlap can cause real confusion — particularly when a Group inside a service-delivery Department happens to include staff who also belong to an unrelated academic department (a nursing faculty member tutoring students through an Academic Resource Center, for instance). Keeping this distinction in mind will help you have clearer conversations with your team about who should have access to what.

How It Works

The hierarchy

Institution > Department (service delivery container) > Group (where the actual work happens)

A Group cannot exist without a Department. You can always choose how to organize your Departments, but every Group you create will belong to exactly one.

Admin access flows from Department to Group automatically

This is the most important mechanical fact about the Department/Group relationship: a person placed as a Department Director over a Department is automatically granted administrative access to every Group inside it. No one has to manually add that person as a Group Admin to each individual Group — it happens on its own, and it applies immediately to any new Group added to that Department later.

This has real, practical consequences:

• If your institution's Department structure genuinely reflects who oversees what, this automatic inheritance is a feature — the right person gets the right access without extra setup.
• If your Departments are organized more loosely (for convenience, or historical reasons) and don't reflect actual oversight boundaries, this same inheritance can unintentionally grant someone administrative access to Groups they shouldn't be managing.

Group Manager vs. Group Admin — a role is not the same as a placement

You will encounter two related but distinct terms:

• Group Manager is a system role — the level of platform access a person's account carries.
• Group Admin is a placement — a person specifically assigned administrative responsibility for one particular Group, regardless of their underlying role.

A person can be placed as a Group Admin on a Group without holding the Group Manager role (for example, a Department Director or ConexED Administrator can also appear as a Group Admin on a specific Group). Don't assume the two always go together.

The role hierarchy

From highest to lowest platform-wide access:

Almost everything is configured at the Group level, not the Department level

With very few exceptions, ConexED does not offer a way to configure a setting once at the Department level and have it apply to every Group inside it. Locations, Reason Codes, Forms, Email Templates (group-level appointment templates), No Show Alerts, Lobby Settings, and Scheduling Settings must each be set up individually, Group by Group. The one meaningful exception is a kiosk configured in "Department mode," which does automatically include every Group in that Department — including new ones added later.

Please note: because Group-level settings don't inherit from the Department, a Department with many Groups means many separate configuration surfaces to build and keep consistent over time.

Decision Guide: Broad Departments vs. Narrow Departments

There isn't a universally "correct" way to structure your Departments — but the platform's behavior makes narrower Departments the lower-risk default for most institutions. Use this table to decide what's right for your situation:

Use Cases

Scenario: One manager, several related service areas.

A college's Academic Resource Center runs Math, Science, Academic Coaching, and Nursing tutoring under one manager. Since this person genuinely oversees all four areas, placing them as Department Director over one "Tutoring" Department is the appropriate structure — they get full administrative tools (reporting, structure management, and more) without needing to be manually added to each Group.

Scenario: Shared service area with an external stakeholder concern.

In the scenario above, the Nursing group includes nursing faculty who report elsewhere academically. If the Nursing program's leadership is concerned about the ARC manager's access to "their" staff, it's worth knowing that placing the ARC manager as a Group Manager on all four Groups instead of Department Director does not meaningfully reduce what they can see about the nursing faculty — the same names, titles, and group assignments remain visible. What that downgrade does remove is the ARC manager's ability to run the center: no cross-group reporting, no Scheduling Control Center access, no ability to create new Groups, no Shared Milestones, no Automations. If the real goal is to fully separate the Nursing group from the ARC manager's oversight, the effective solution is a structural one — placing Nursing in its own, separately administered Department.

Configuration Overview

Departments and Groups are managed from the Dept & Group Manager section of the left-hand navigation (a dedicated module — this is no longer nested inside a general Admin Panel menu). From there:

• Manage Departments lets Department Directors and above create Departments, add Department Admins, and add Groups within them.
• Once inside a specific Group, a full set of tabs becomes available — Calendar, Student Lookup, Appointment Lookup, Check-In Kiosk, Master Scheduler, Document Library, Email Templates, No Show Alerts, Locations, Reason Codes, Login Type, Group Cards, Forms, Reports, and Settings (with Main, Scheduling, and Lobby sub-tabs) — each covered in its own article in this KB category.

Visibility into a Department's management tabs depends on being placed as a Department Director (or higher) on that specific Department — it isn't something every ConexED Administrator automatically sees for every department without being added.

Next Steps

• How to Add Locations to a Group
• Understanding Role Boundary for Reason Codes
• How to Create Group Forms
• How to Clone a Group Form
• How to use the Group No Show Alerts Settings
• How to Customize your Group Lobby Settings