Hi Guys, have their been any updates on this matter?

I work for a professor who asked me to create a database of all his citations. I've done that, and now need to figure out the best way to transfer it to him. Ideally I would like him to be able to open the library and be able to sync with Zotero with his own user name and password, rather than being stuck with the one I originally selected to create the database. Another professor I support wants me to do the same thing for her, so eventually I'd like to get this transferred to Professor A, wipe out my library, and then rebuild a new one for Professor B.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated...thank you!

Thank you very much, bdarcus, for the reply and suggestion. I've gone ahead and created a group, but I don't see how to add any of the things in my library to its library. I looked through the online documentation on groups and don't see anything there, or within Zotero. The group I created is not showing up in the window that contains 'My Library', though it does show up on my Zotero profile on the web page.

How would I move items into this group library? Thanks in advance!

you need to sync first - then your library will show up in your local copy of Zotero and you can drag and drop references

it's safe, but yeah, that seems like a bad workflow -
why not start doing that in a new group right away?

Aside: I don't know about anyone else, but I'm struck that the groups feature has not been as successful as I'd expected.

It's really easy to point to quite a few probable reasons for this. Basically the Groups user interface (both on the web and in the client) has seen no fundamental changes from the time it was first introduced, and it has had some huge problems from the start. Here's just the most important problems that spring to mind:

Zotero Groups ties you to ZFS. While this is no problem for some, it is a problem for very many scientific organizations, whose policies on data sharing often simply forbid storing data on outside servers. The Zotero Server code has not materialized in any mass-usable form yet.

Web interface is virtually unusable. There is no sorting. It is not possible to customize the displayed columns. Various pages make no distinction between items and attachments (confusing). The Group homepage is ill-organized. It takes too many clicks to get to individual items and to attachments. It takes way too many clicks to add members to closed groups, whereas this is one of the most common actions for group admins. Group Settings page is ill-organized (for example, why is Transfer ownership so prominent whereas Inviting new members is hidden under a "Send new invitations" text link at the bottom (and yes, in a hacked place at the top)).

Client interface could be much improved too. Why are collections expanded by default? This makes the interface unusable if you have more than a few groups. Plus it's impossible to collapse all subcollections at once — and expanding all groups after collapsing them at the "Group Libraries" level makes all subcollections expand again. Groups cannot be sorted in the client (and how they are sorted in the first place is unclear). Dragging and dropping collections is awkward/impossible. Even though from the start on there has been talk of an invisible "link" between local items and group items, there is no actually still no way to keep them synced: changes made in a group have no effect on the local item nor vice versa.

I say this all as a user of the Groups feature. It has taken me a lot of energy to explain all these quirks to colleagues and collaborators, and several of them have chosen to stay away from the Groups feature because of these quirks. It would be great if the web interface could finally be overhauled with some attention to usability and accessibility, and if the client UI could be improved.

Web interface improvements are indeed underway—many of them (such as sorting) are dependent on API improvements, which are being made along with new API functionality being added for Zotero Everywhere.

With all due respect, that's not the only, nor to my mind the best, way to solve this problem. The other is encourage a more robust open source community of web developers that are willing and able to contribute their labor to improving features such as this.

I certainly agree. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet either. I could hazard some more guesses as to why, but it hasn't. The user community has generally stayed away from the larger projects; with the notable exception of Frank Bennett's work (and your own work in designing CSL), most work has been in translator, style, and plugin development. These are all somewhat easier to take on.

[An alternate explanation is that plugins, styles, and translators have a shorter and more transparent route to the user community / release, so they provide a good way for user-developers to scratch their itches; immediate gratification, as it were.]

Anyway, I do think that we are seeing a more healthy developer community today than when I started to use Zotero two short years ago in fall 2008, so we're moving in the right direction.

@noksagt: don't really know. I'm just struck that I've started a few groups that in theory should have broad interest, but the enrollment is very low, and the participation even lower. Admittedly, part of this is likely that the community of people in those areas who use Zotero at all is quite low. But I did find using the groups feature in a class of mine last year somewhat awkward. One little reason is that notes are not designed for groups (you can't have a threaded conversation, for example).

I'm trying to do the same thing as jgeorgia, and can't figure out how after reading this thread...but I may have made a critical error early on. I have a large personal library in Zotero and when I started a new research job I made created collections within that library specifically for the professor I'm working with. Now I want to move her materials to a group library, but the sync command seems to be library-wide, and she doesn't need everything I have in the whole library. Is there any way to move just a collection into a group library? (Is this actually a different question than jgeorgia's? I find the groups feature somewhat baffling.)

Ah. Thanks, very clear. I think one of my problems was that I set up a generic identity on Zotero groups for the purposes of moving stuff from my personal library to the shared group library (thinking it would be better to have a group name and group login detached from our personal names), but then couldn't sync from my computer to the zotero server. Once I went back to being just me the syncing worked.

Ahhh, got it. For others confused this way, the client interface is where you drag and drop, not on the webpage. Use the new group library tab and then drag to the group there, not from the client interface to the group page online.