New to Front? Here's what teammate groups are, and why they replaced custom roles.

If you're newer to Front you might see people mention "custom roles" and "teammate groups" and wonder what the difference is. Front moved from one to the other, so I wanted to break it down in plain terms: what a teammate group actually is, and why it's a better way to run your team.

So what is a teammate group?

It's just a named list of people. That's really it. You might have a Support group, a Sales group, a Managers group, and so on. Once you've built that list, Front lets you reuse it for lots of things instead of setting up each person one by one.

What can you use them for?

A single group can control:

• What those people are allowed to do (reply to messages, delete them, change settings, and so on)
• What they can see (which inboxes and workspaces)
• Where work goes. You can point a routing rule at a group so incoming messages get shared out among them automatically.

So one list answers four questions at once: who are these people, what can they see, what can they do, and what work should come to them.

Set your "floor" first.

Before you start building groups, decide the baseline: the things you're happy for everyone to do by default, like reading and replying to messages. In Front this is your default "Everyone" (per workspace) permission level. Every person in the workspace starts on this floor. Depending on your Front plan, you may be able to add extra abilities on top of this floor level. By default, and on all plans you get two presets: Default and All permissions (All permissions = workspace-admin-level, not company admin). Enterprise plans do have a custom option, which will allow specific abilities (‘give this group exactly these permissions’)

When should you create a group?

Whenever you've got a set of people who should be treated the same way, whether that's the same abilities, the same inboxes, or the same work routed to them. A good rule of thumb if you used to have custom roles: make one group for each role you had, give it that role's abilities, and add the right people to it (provided you have the correct Front plan)

One thing to watch: abilities stack.

If someone is in more than one group, they get the combined abilities of all of them, and the most powerful one wins. Say Tim is in Support (read and reply only) and also in Sales (read, reply and delete). Even for an email routed to Support, Tim can still delete it, because his delete ability comes from being in Sales and follows him everywhere. So if you want to keep someone's access tight, be careful how many groups you put them in.

Why groups are the better model.

The old custom roles only ever answered one question: what is this person allowed to do? A group answers four at once. That means less repeated setup, you can reuse the same group inside your routing rules, and group membership can even sync with your company's login system so it updates itself as people join or leave. Fewer moving parts and a lot less manual upkeep.

Hope that helps anyone getting their head around it. Happy to answer questions.