General Information on Types of Groups
There are three types of Groups in RSpace:
LabGroups (discussed here) are the most common type of group, especially in Universities. LabGroups can be created and managed, by the sysadmin, or if your server policies allow it, they can also be created by PIs from the My RSpace area. LabGroups are designed to put Principal Investigators firmly in charge of a group of researchers. A LabGroup can only have a single primary PI (Principal Investigator) who it is assumed to have the authority to view the work of all individual members the shared work in the main LabGroup_shared folder and all related materials in the inventory system. PIs can also set certain lab policies and control the organizational schema of shared data. Users can create new subfolders, in the LabGroup_shared folder, but only the PI and LabAdmins can delete and reorganize subfolders. In a LabGroup, the PI can automatically see all the work of all the members, except for the work of other group members who have the rank of PI in other LabGroups.
Collaboration Groups are generally used for fromal collaboration between members of two or more different LabGroups with full knowledge and consent of the PIs. Only work shared with the group is visible to all members.
Project Groups (if enabled on your server), allow for ad-hoc sharing between two or more users without necessarily involving a PI. If Project Groups have been enabled on your server, any user can initiate the creation of a project group from the My RSpace area. Only work shared with the group is visible to all members. All members can easily create, delete and reorganize subfolders.
In RSpace, access to documents and notebooks is controlled by Group membership. If you don't belong to any Groups, you cannot share anything with anyone, nobody can see your data, and the "Share" button will not appear in your toolbar.