The People table and its subtables for employees and external users stores information about individuals who use your system.

The People table contains data about individual users of your system and individuals with whom your organization has contact or business relationships. There are two basic subtypes of users: External Users and Employees. Most external contacts will go in the External User table, as the Employee table tracks information that does not apply to people outside your company, such as working hours and hire date. People records normally have a link to a record in the Company table to define which company is related to the person. 

People are considered static and do not have a workflow associated with them.  People may be created manually by Guests (self-registering), Support Staff, and members of the Professional Services, Sales staff and Admin groups. Guest record creation is enabled by default so users can create their own logins using the limited-access "register" account. 

People may also be created as the result of a conversion from a Lead or Contract record, or may be created as part of an import from an external database such as an LDAP directory.  Each person record is assigned either a Team or an individual from the Employees subtable as the "Owner".

In general, we recommend that all people be created in either the Employees or External Users subtable, and not in the top level "People" table.  External users are generally linked to external companies, while employees are linked to your own company.

Employee layout

The Employee sub-table has a rule attached to it that runs a conversion of an Employee record to the Approvals table when triggered by a field changed on the Employee record. This facilitates the Knowledge Management approval process.

Groups and Teams

Users of the system are associated with a Primary Team and with one or more groups and additional teams.  Assigning the correct value for a user's groups and teams is critical for giving them the appropriate permissions in the system.  Groups control their access to tables and records and fields, while teams control their default views, dashboard, and other elements of the interface.