Applications → Managing States → Ownership of Items
SBM provides two types of ownership: primary ownership and secondary ownership. Primary ownership means that a single user is responsible for an item while it resides in a particular state. Secondary ownership lets multiple users own an item in a state. With appropriate privileges, secondary owners can view, update, and transition items as needed.
To provide accountability for primary items, an owner is designated for each state in the workflow. Each state may have a primary owner, a primary owner and secondary owners, or secondary owners.
You define primary ownership for each state by selecting a single User field, such as Manager, Engineer, or Tester, in the Owner drop-down list on the General tab for each state. The selections for the User field determine who is available as a primary owner. You can specify role selections for the field in SBM Composer. User and group selections for User fields are made in SBM Application Administrator.
The selections from that User field are available to users, but they can only select a single user as a primary owner for each state in which the the item resides. This ensures that primary items always have one user who is primarily responsible for it while it resides in each state.
Consider the following when you set primary ownership of items:
When you configure a workflow, define single User fields before assigning the Owner property for each state. Then, in each transition that moves items into the state, move the User field that populates the Owner property into the Standard section so that it is available to all users who can transition the item.
In some workflows and projects, you may want to pre-select a specific owner for items in each state and hide the Owner field so that the system alone manages ownership. For example, the manager of a specific project needs to be the owner of items in the "Submit" and "Assigned" states. You can modify the project and select a default value for the Owner field, and then move the field to the Hidden section in the "Submit" and "Assigned" states. The Owner field automatically contains the value. Therefore, ownership does not need to be selected by the user.
You can set the Owner field as read-only if you want to keep the field visible. This lets you explicitly see who the owner of the item is and prevents users from changing the owner.
You can select "None" as the ownership value for a state. While this is an appropriate value in some cases, such as closed items, keep in mind that an item without an owner might be forgotten.
You can set up a workflow so that one or more users are secondarily responsible for items in a particular state. For example, you can set up a queue into which all new incidents are submitted and let users who are specified as secondary owners for new incidents transition items from the queue into their inbox. Or, you can designate a single user as a secondary owner for a particular state, letting this user transition items from that state instead of the primary owner.
A User, Multi-User, or Multi-Group field can be used to populate the secondary ownership property. The selections for the User, Multi-User, or Multi-Group field determine which users and groups are available as secondary owners. You can also specify whether users can select individual users or groups as secondary owners.
Consider the following when you set secondary ownership of items:
The Secondary Owner field is an optional system field that must be added to a primary table before you can configure secondary ownership.
When you configure a workflow, define User, Multi-User, and Multi-Group fields before assigning the "Secondary Owner" property for each state. Then, in each transition that moves items into the state, make sure the appropriate User, Multi-User, and Multi-Group field is moved so that it appears in the Standard section and is available to all users.
You can set up your workflow so that items in a particular state have a primary owner and secondary owners, or you can specify that items in a state have only secondary owners. For example, a manager may want to assign items to a group of several users, who can then decide who should take ownership of the items. Each member of this group can be specified as secondary owners since the group as a whole has responsibility for items in that state. When items are assigned to the group, each user in the group may see the item on his or her home page and may receive e-mail notifications about the items.
You can also use a Multi-Group field to define secondary ownership, letting members of multiple groups set selections for the field to transition items as needed.
For best performance, select the Groups & users option. Also, be aware that if you change the selection mode for a Multi-User or Secondary Owner field back to individual users or group members after populating groups in either field, performance may be impacted when the groups are unrolled to display large lists of individual users.
You can select None as a secondary owner value for a state.
If you configured your workflow so that only secondary ownership is enabled for a state, the primary owner value displays as "None" in the state change history, change history, and the Owner field.
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