What is Group Limiting?

Group limiting is the ability to limit access to a content item or folder by a specific group or set of groups. Group limiting is achieved by publishing to an Organization, right-clicking on file or folder properties and selecting "Add Group Limits" (it will show "Edit Group Limits" if you've added a group already). 

Group limiting can be confusing at first because you're not limiting access from the group(s) you've selected, but rather limiting access to the group(s) you've selected. If I choose to group limit a folder to Managers group, only my Managers group will see it.

Benefits to Group-Limiting:

1. You are not limited to the number of groups that can view this content using this method of limiting access—you can add as many groups as you'd like. Pro tip—If you're adding so many groups that everyone in your org can see the content, then you might not need any group limits on that content at all!
2. Since you're not limited on groups that you can limit access to, you're ensuring you're publishing your content in one place, which makes modification and organization much more streamlined. Publishing directly to groups (which we'll dive into below) requires publishing to each individual group, making modification and organization more difficult to keep track of.
3. If you have multiple files & folders that are group-limited and your environment has multiple groups of users accessing the same device, group limiting ensures that the content still lives on the device (albeit hidden if you're not in the group it's limited to) and it'll display or hide the content based on who's logged in at that point in time. You don't want your crew to see content intended for your managers if it's sensitive or irrelevant to them. This also means your device won't have to sync down the new content for the new user when they log in. 

What is Publishing Directly to Groups?

In your content publisher view, you'll see options to be able to publish to the Organization (recommended), Groups, and Member. If you expand the "Groups" list, you'll see your Groups populate, and through this method, you're able to publish content to a single group at a time. 

The downsides of this method are two-fold—It requires the device to sync the content down once a member of that Group logs into the device, which can cause issues for low-bandwidth environments. Secondly, it makes modification and organization of content more difficult to achieve, as you're having to publish to each individual group, versus the method of Group Limiting mentioned above in which you're able to select multiple groups for a single content item. Having to dig around, remember which groups it's published to, search for it, and update becomes cumbersome quickly. That said, there are some times when it may make sense to go this route.

When to consider publishing directly to a group:

1. If content is only relevant to a single group, and doesn't need much modification
2. If you're okay with content syncing down only once a member of a particular group logs into the app on a particular device
3. From a storage-perspective, if you only need certain devices for certain groups and there isn't much cross-over, this can potentially help save on storage space.