Setting Up A Workgroup

Imagine a project manager who needs to set everything up for a team of engineers working with IO Ninja. This tutorial provides a step-by-step tutorial of how you might approach this task.

1. Create a workgroup account

First of all, we will need a workgroup account to share IO Ninja resources among team members.

1.a Create a new account

Please navigate to https://ioninja.com/account/register.html and create a new workgroup account:

1.b Convert a personal account to a workgroup

Alternatively, you can select one of your existing accounts and change it into a workgroup from the Profile page. Navigate to https://ioninja.com/account/register.html and scroll down to the Change Account Type section. Now, select Workgroup and click Apply.

Once you have a workgroup account, you need to decide how exactly members will join your workgroup.

2. Set up workgroup membership policy

1.a Auto-approve memberships

The most convenient method which suits most companies is to auto-approve memberships based on the email domain.

Navigate to https://ioninja.com/account/workgroup.html and scroll down to the Membership Requests section. Here, check both Allow membership requests and Auto-approve new memberships based on email, then specify the required email domain(s):

In the example shown above, people with accounts like john@mycompany.com, mary@mycompany.com, webmaster@mycompany.com, and so on – all will be auto-approved for your workgroup.

1.b Manually approve membership requests

If you need to be a little bit more strict, you can disable the auto-approve. In this case, you will need to manually approve new members in the Pending Requests section as shown below:

1.c Invite-only

Finally, you can choose not to accept membership requests at all and only allow memberships by invitation. To invite a member, scroll up to the Invite Members section, type the new member’s email and hit Invite. Please note that this user must have a personal IO Ninja account beforehand.

The person must accept the invitation from his account, and then they becomes a workgroup member.

3. Manage workgroup resources

The next topic is how a workgroup provides resources to the workgroup members.

3.a Subscriptions

The easiest way to share resources is via subscriptions. Subscriptions enable absolutely every capability of IO Ninja for the subscription period:

After adding a subscription to the cart, adjust the desired number of seats for your workgroup:

If you own a workgroup license for IO Ninja v3.x.x, you have $500 credits on your account; those credits can be used to pay for the subscription. That is, if there are 5 members in your workgroup, your credits will cover 20 months of subscription on each seat.

3.b Capabilities

An alternative is to purchase individual capabilities. The upside here is that capability purchases are perpetual and do not expire. What’s yours is yours. On the other hand, this approach is much harder to manage, and it requires more planning. At the very least, you would need a talk with your engineers to make a list of which capabilities and how many seats of each one are required.

Then you go to the Capabilities page at https://ioninja.com/account/capabilities.html and add the required number of seats according to the requests of your engineers. In the end, your cart for a workgroup of 5 members might look something like this:

3.c Direct credit transfer

As mentioned above, owners of a workgroup license for IO Ninja v3.x.x receive $500 credits that can pay for subscription or capabilities. So, if you have credits on your workgroup account, there’s yet another option – simply transfer credits to individual members and let them decide on how to spend them.

Credit information is available on the Payment Methods page. If there are 5 members and you have $500 credits, you might decide to transfer $100 to each of the members as shown below:

The downside of this approach is that credit transfers are permanent. If workgroup members leave the team, their accounts keep all capabilities or subscriptions purchased with your credits.

4. Joining your workgroup

To join your workgroup, prospective members should navigate to the Workgroup section of their personal account profiles. Over there, they specify the email of your workgroup account and click Join.

If their request satisfies the membership policy configured by you earlier, they become members of your workgroup. Now, they can borrow workgroup resources – subscriptions and capabilities.

5. Borrowing resources

Members of your workgroup can borrow subscriptions or capabilities. Instead of adding items to the shopping cart and then paying for it with money or IO Ninja credits, members can borrow resources from the workgroup. For example, to borrow a subscription, a member navigates to the Subscription page and clicks Borrow:

After a successful borrow, a member can use the resource in the same way as if it was purchased. For example, a borrowed subscription enables all capabilities for the member’s account.

If a borrowed resource is not needed by particular members anymore, they can return it back to the workgroup (aka UNBORROW) for others to use: