Manage Groups – Parsec

Overview

When you create your Team in Parsec, you have the option to place team members and computers in Groups. Groups allow you to manage access and connection permissions between users and parts of your organization. Every member of your Team starts out in the "unassigned" group, but you can use a CSV upload to assign a group of users quickly.

People who are assigned to the Super Admin or Admin roles have permission to change what groups they and other members of your Team are in. The person who created the team initially is automatically made a Super Admin. Super Admins are the only people who can assign admin roles to other team members. In the Members & Invites category, you can see what group each user is in and assign them to a different group. Users may be assigned to multiple groups at a time.

Create group

To create a group, on the Group Management tab, click 'New Group'.

Connection permissions within groups

When you create or edit your group, you can choose to manage the ability for group members to connect with each other. For example, you might want to disable this if you're inviting external people into a new group for a play-test event. Disabling this setting would prevent those invitees from connecting to each other. Alternatively, you may want to enable it if you have a team organized into groups and individuals within a group need to regularly connect for reviews.

As shown above, you may also control the visibility of these computers with three levels of granularity.

Show/hide teams computers assigned to the group (recommended visibility)
Show/hide teams computers assigned to members of the group (more visibility)
Show/hide any member’s computer in the group (most visibility, use with caution)

Disabling any of the above toggles hides those specific computers so they are not listed in group member hosts lists inside their native Parsec apps.

Connection permissions between groups

You can also allow members of two groups to initiate connections between each other. The group that can initiate an outgoing request is able to connect to team computers that are part of that other group. They are also able to join using a share link that the other group creates.

Here’s how the component looks when editing an existing group and no other groups have permissions to connect.

Here’s how the component looks when editing an existing group that has other groups already added, and you’re actively attempting to add an additional group (i.e. QA).

After adding a new group, you may edit the connection permissions. Clicking “Edit Permissions” brings up the following configuration modal.

Similar to the connection and visibility settings of computers within the same group, you may also control the visibility of computers belonging to other groups with three levels of granularity.

Show/hide teams computers assigned to the other group (recommended visibility)
Show/hide teams computers assigned to members of the other group (more visibility)
Show/hide any member’s computer belonging to the other group (most visibility, use with caution)

Disabling any of the above toggles hides those specific computers so they are not listed in the hosts lists of group members’ native Parsec apps. You may also restrict the flow of connections or visibility to either one direction (in vs out).

How do connection permissions with other groups work in practice?

Let’s revisit the previous example and explore how these settings for a group named “Internal Beta Testers,” plays out in practice. Members of this group are internal employees assigned to test new game builds or a similar high resolution project.

Imagine our “Internal Beta Testers” group is configured with three other allowed groups that it can make connections to:

The “Animation Team” are designers working on animation.
The “HUD Team” are developers working on a the heads up display interface
The “Lobby Squad” are a group of trusted public beta testers

Below are three scenarios describing exactly how the “Internal Beta Testers” group might interact with each of the three allowed groups:

The “Internal Beta Testers” group is permitted to both receive (in) requests from and send (out) requests to connect to the "Animation Team" group for real-time iteration on design tweaks based on their feedback.
The “Internal Beta Testers” group can only receive (in) requests from the “HUD Team” group so that they can showcase bugs they find, but is not allowed to send (out) requests to connect. You might encounter a need for this if you have groups of users that are only allowed to access certain machines, like a QA group.
The “Internal Beta Testers” group can only send requests out to the “Lobby Squad,” our fictional group of community power users who are trusted to send in feedback for public betas. Our internal beta testers can send requests to connect, but the “Lobby Squad” is not allowed to connect to other internal machines.

⚠️ Caution: Where is my host when viewing the Parsec app?

Can’t find a specific host that should be listed? Below are common scenarios that might cause host computers in a group to appear hidden to team members:

Disabled parent toggles – Please note that if the toggles for “Allow Connections within Group” or “Allow Connections from [Group 1] to [Group 2]” are disabled, it also disables all linked toggles, hiding all computers in those groups as hosts. This means that group members will not be able to see computers assigned to the group or those assigned to other members. However, they will still be able to see team computers assigned to them directly.
Parsec app’s host display limit – The Parsec app is currently designed to display a maximum of 256 hosts at a time. Any group configured to include more than 256 hosts may have some hosts appear hidden. This is a known UX limitation that may change in a future release.

Deleting a group

When you delete a group, it does not remove the users in that group from your Team. When the group is deleted, users whose only group assignment was to the deleted group will not be assigned to any groups. Users who were assigned to multiple groups will be removed from the deleted group but will remain in all of their other groups. Follow the steps below to delete a group:

From the Group Management tab, select the group that you would like to delete.
Click the 'Edit' tab.
Click 'Delete Group'.

Click 'Yes, Delete'.

Group based app settings

In May 2022, App Rules replaced group-specific app settings. Previously-existing group-specific settings had a corresponding ruleset created and assigned to members retroactively. For more information, please see the App Rules article.

Create group specific administrator

It is possible to delegate group specific administration by leveraging Role Based Access Control (RBAC) Please note this feature requires Parsec for Teams Enterprise licensing. Follow the steps below to create a role to administer specific groups. A group specific role can only be created for one group at a time. If there are multiple groups that need specific administrators, multiple roles will need to be created. Follow the steps below to create a group specific administrator role.

From the 'Admin Roles' tab, click 'New Role'.
Provide a name for the group specific administrator role.
Select the 'Group' radio button.
Select a group.
Choose an identifier color for the role. (optional)
Click 'Create New Role'.

A real world example

If your goal is to have people outside of your company connect to a specific set of computers inside your office for user research, play-testing, or anything else, you might want to set up your groups like this:

Create an External User group
Create a User Research Lab group
Assign members to the External User group from outside of your company
Turn off the ability to connect within the group
Allow the External User group to make an outgoing connection request to the User Research Lab group
Set up users on each of the User Research Lab computers and assign them to the User Research Lab group
When it's time for the UX research, the External User group will be able to request to connect to the computers that the User Research Lab group have logged into.