PDF Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes
The Resource module of PD Place provides a great respository for documents, videos and web sites that can enhance their professional development. An item added to the resources of PD Place can be restricted to public or private users, but in general your employees will have full access to all of the content.
It is also possible to link specific resources to any number of in-services via the in-service detail screen. If you do this, then users who view the in-service detail information screen, will be provided with links to the associated resources directly from this screen.
All of the above has been in place for most of the life of PD Place. However, in version 3.7 and higher, a new field was added which provides a powerful tool in situations where you want to restrict who has access to certain resources. This new field is available during resource creation and can also be toggled on or off by those with access to the the resource detail screen.
The new field on the resource detail screen is shown below:
Setting this field to “YES” has the following affect:
a) Any user who does not have data entry access rights (General Users, etc), will not be able to see the existance of the resource unless they are currently registered in an in-service linked to this resource. This is true for all the resource module search methods. The links on the in-service information screen will also not appear until the user is actually in an attending status. Those on a waiting list or pending payment can not access the information.
b) Any user with data entry access rights will still be able to see the resource regardless of the setting fo this field.
This can prove to be an extremely useful feature in situations such as:
a) You must pay copyright or usage fees when a resource is used. In these cases you know exactly how many individuals you have accessing the information based on the in-service attendace lists.
b) You can limit the number of potential individuals accessing large resources or resource restricted to certain employee groups.
I am sure there are also many more uses of this functionality in the professional development environment.
