Organization management

For Global Admins, organization management can be accessed via the Organization tile upon login, or via the top bar menu (Organization). This chapter will help you understand how to view, create, and manage organizational units (OUs), users, and groups within the hierarchy structure in the TAO Portal.

What is Organization management?

The Organization feature is primarily used to control and segregate data access from an administrative perspective. Organization management is built on a hierarchical system: the higher a user with administrative privileges is placed within the hierarchy, the broader the set of data they can access.

This hierarchy is made up of Organizational Units (OUs). When creating a user or group, assigning them to an OU is mandatory. For administrative users, only the OUs that fall under their assigned OU will be visible within the Organization Management interface.

Benefits of using hierarchies

In larger organizations, administrators often manage only specific subsets of users, groups, or sessions (e.g., within a single school in a district). With this example, assigning an administrator to an OU representing a specific school ensures that they can only access rostering data related to that school—even if they hold a global admin role.

This structure ensures that all roster data management aligns with a user's place in the hierarchy. For example:

• A user assigned to a school-level OU can only manage users, groups, or sessions within that OU or its sub-OUs.

• They will only see data relevant to their assigned OU and its children.

• However, users assigned to higher-level OUs can still interact with lower-level OUs, provided those OUs are children of their own.

Best practices for using hierarchies

To streamline the rostering process, it's best to build the organizational hierarchy before adding test takers or creating groups. A recommended order of operations is:

1. Create the necessary Organizational Units.

2. Create groups and assign them to the appropriate OUs.

3. Assign test takers to the correct groups and OUs.

Although users and groups can be reassigned later, establishing the hierarchy beforehand can save time—especially since assigning an OU is a required step during user and group setup.

Common use case (example)

Here’s a typical example of how a hierarchy might be structured:

• The top-level OU (or “root”) represents a school district (e.g., NYC Public Schools).

  • A limited number of admins are assigned to this top-level OU. These users act as super-admins with full access across the entire Portal.

• Under the district root, create individual child-OUs for each school within the district:

  • Each school’s IT staff can be made admins of their respective school OU. They’ll have full control over their school’s data but won’t see or access data from other schools.

• Test takers are assigned to their school’s OU without global roles. This allows them to be grouped as needed within their school’s OU.

• Teachers or test administrators are also assigned to their school OU. They can then be given roles such as Group Manager, Scorer, or Proctor within any group created under their OU.

• Any group created by someone assigned to a school OU will automatically be placed under that OU. When assigning users to a group, only users visible to the creator (i.e., those in the same OU or below) will be listed.