Understand organisations, sites and zones

Almost every confusing behaviour in MassComs traces back to this model. Read it once properly and the rest of the product stops being surprising.

1. 01

   Organisation — the tenant boundary

   The establishment is the top of the tree and the hard boundary for data. Users, sites, devices, incidents and reports belong to exactly one organisation and are never visible from another.

   This is enforced in the database itself, not only in the interface. It is why a user from one organisation cannot be added to another's incident even by mistake.

2. 02

   Site — the physical and permission boundary

   A site is one campus or address. Sites are also how access is narrowed: a user scoped to a site sees that site's people, devices and incidents, and no others.

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   Multi-site organisations should scope most users to their own site and reserve organisation-wide visibility for the small group who genuinely coordinate across sites.

3. 03

   Building and floor — the geometry containers

   Buildings hold floors; floors hold floorplans. The floor is the unit a plan is attached to and the unit multi-floor routing steps between, which is why basements and mezzanines must exist as their own floors even if you never trace them.

4. 04

   Room — where devices and people resolve to

   The room is the smallest unit and the one that matters most operationally. A device assigned to a room can be given a route from that room; a person whose location resolves to a room can be told where they are and where to go.

   Rooms are usually created by the floorplan trace rather than by hand, so their names come from the plan. If the plan labels a room 01.031 and staff call it the Art Room, add a location label so the instruction reads the way people speak.

5. 05

   Zone — what an incident actually targets

   Zones group rooms by response rather than by geography. When you activate an incident you choose a target zone, and MassComs resolves that to the rooms in it, then to the devices and people in those rooms.

   A zone is also where an assembly point is attached. This is why a zone without an assembly point cannot resolve a muster destination — the destination is a property of the zone, not of the room.

   !

   A room in no zone is excluded from every zone-scoped activation. The floorplan builder shows these as Not in a zone — treat that list as a defect list, not a status.

6. 06

   Putting it together

   An incident targeted at Zone A on the First Floor of the Sixth Form Block resolves down to the rooms in that zone, the Agents and screens in those rooms, and the people whose last known location is one of them. Everything above the room level is organisation; everything at and below it is delivery.