Categories offer a way to group processes together.
e.g. You can define categories based on geography.
e.g. If you have a Sales office in USA and Europe with support in Asia and engineering in the USA, you could categorize as
Sales
Engineering
Sales
Help Desk
OR
USA
Europe
Asia
USA
OR any other way.
Categories provide the following benefits:
Organize processes, just like how folders help in organizing documents.
You can control the categories in which certain processes appear. For example, you may not want defects in a category "Sales" nor you may want sales leads in category "Bugs".
A security context. Roles are assigned to users in a category. Read more in the Defining an Application (Chapter 2) section of this manual. In the description above you could have 2 different sales teams in USA and Europe. In the category Europe -> Sales and USA -> Sales you define who plays the roles of Sales Manager and Sales Co-ordinator.