Reference Groups

Reference groups (Referenzgruppen) are your company's private taxonomy: a hierarchical tree of folders for organizing references any way your business thinks — business units, regions, service lines, key-account collections.

They complement the platform-wide industry tree: industries are shared and curated by the platform; groups are yours alone.

Managing groups

The Reference Group Manager (/my/company/reference-groups) manages the tree. Each group has:

• Name, teaser, and description — per language
• A SEO label for clean URLs
• A cover image — used by export templates and showcase views
• A highlight flag and a priority for ordering
• Responsible reviewers — the users suggested first when a reference of this group is submitted for approval
• A status (active/inactive)

Groups can be nested to any depth; move and reorder them to restructure your portfolio without touching the references themselves.

Reviewers per location

For multi-site organizations, one company-wide reviewer list is often too coarse: the Civil Engineering group exists once, but a different controller is responsible at each site. Location-based reviewer assignment — an optional feature we enable per company on request — adds a finer level to the relation: which user reviews which group at which company location.

The assignment can be maintained from three places — all three edit the same relation, so a change made in one shows up in the others:

• Reference group form — add location → reviewer rows below the company-wide reviewer list
• Location form — add reference group → reviewer rows: declare per site who reviews which group
• Team member dialog — a Reviewer responsibilities section lists and edits a member's assignments as location → reference group rows — ideal when onboarding a new controller in one pass

When a reference is submitted for approval, the suggested reviewers are those responsible for the reference's groups at its responsible company location. Groups without a location-specific assignment fall back to the company-wide reviewers.

Assigning references

References are assigned to groups on the basic data tab — multiple groups per reference are fine (a project can belong to Business Unit East and Flagship Projects at once). New groups can be created inline while editing a reference.

Where groups are used

• Filtering — groups are a facet in the Reference Manager
• Approval routing — group reviewers are pre-selected in the publish notification
• Showcase & exports — groups structure your embeddable showcase and can drive catalog exports with the group's cover image