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 Department is a service delivery container, a category.  It is our way of organizing related services together.  It has no built-in relationship to your institution's academic departments or organizational chart. So keep in mind - "Department" does not mean what you might expect - when you begin to configure. 
• A Group is where the actual work happens - the appointments, drop-ins, meetings, events.  The interactions that staff are having with students and the data that comes from them.  Note permissions, data tracking reasons, calendar availability settings, confirmation emails, data collection and forms setting 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 user with a Department Director role, is automatically granted admin access to every Group inside the Department once they are assigned.  
• Almost all settings - Locations, Forms, Reason Codes, buffers, no Show Alerts, Kisok settings - are configured per Group.  There are very few Department-level settings. 
• The Student Support Directory — the browsable staff listing available to students and campus visitors - allows for filtering by both Department and Group name. 

As an example to clarify the above:  A college might set up a ConexED Department called "Tutoring" that contains four separate Groups: Math Tutoring, Science & Allied Health Tutoring, Academic Coaching, and Writing Center. The person who administers that ConexED Department can have a role of 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 have access to administer that particular service delivery unit, the Tutoring department, created in 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

By intentional design, 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. This ensures each group flexibility to use features that apply to their service area and their existing workflows individually.  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 separate group configurations to implement.  At first glance, this may seem complicated, but, group autonomy, flexible feature adoption and customization within settings and forms make the initial configuration efforts worth it.  In addition, Group Managers have access to maintain group settings and such, so all subsequent group maintenance is then delegated to them in multi-group departments, and less post-implementation decisions and changes require a large, collective buy-in.  

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:

Structure your Departments around what areas continuously work collaboratively, sharing information and supporting each other in daily workflows and physical locations - and ALSO take into consideration  who actually has administrative oversight of which service areas.

Likely, your Department & Group configuration will be a combination of each type.  Do not simply configure based on your campus org chart or around how your institution happens to name its offices.

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, who has a job title of Academic Resource Center Coordinator.  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.

Imagine in the scenario above, the Nursing tutoring group includes nursing faculty who report elsewhere academically. Imagine the Nursing program's leadership is concerned about the ARC manager's access to "their" staff. 

Option 1: Change the Academic Resource Center Coordinator's role to Group Manager, and place this person in each of the other tutoring groups, except the Nursing Tutoring group. This will prevent access to the Nursing Tutoring Group.  However,  that downgrade limits the ARC coordinator's ability to collective see data and seamlessly run the center: there will be no cross-group reporting, no Scheduling Control Center access, no ability to create new Groups, no Shared Milestones, no Automations. In addition, an employee who does supervise the nursing faculty members, will need to be added as a Group Manager and will be expected to manage the administration of the entire Nursing Group.  

Option 2: Best practice in such a situation, would be that the managing supervisor of the nursing faculty members who work as tutors, would be added as a Group Manager to the Nursing tutoring Group, to ensure oversight through collective access. The coordinator would keep the Director role to effectively manage the entire Academic Resource Center. 

Option 3:  If the real goal is to fully separate the Nursing group from the ARC manager's oversight, the  other effective solution is a structural one — place Nursing in its own, separately administered group, within the Department that holds the other Academic Nursing Groups, and assign the Group manager who oversees those groups, to this new, separate, nursing tutoring group. 

Configuration Overview

Departments and Groups are managed from the Dept & Group Manager section of the left-hand navigation 

• 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