In Testing: Virtual groups

As we've discussed before, we've been developing a few improvements to the Iceni's powerful hierarchical grouping system. You can read more about the existing group configuration system in the knowledgebase article. The group configuration system has proved extremely successful, but we wanted to extend its flexibility whilst keeping it very understandable. To this end, we have developed the concept of virtual groups - this is a secondary tree of groups, which can be used to create configuration modifiers to be overlaid when certain conditions are met.

This can be used, for example, to relax filtering rules for specific groups of users in locations where they will be supervised. In the example shown, the heritable group configuration will be resolved as usual, but when the user steve is using a workstation listed in the Test networks group, additional configuration from the Test virtual group will be overlaid.

Inspiration for this interface was drawn from the "virtual mailboxes" or "search folders" functionality found in some email readers, such as Mozilla Thunderbird.