Sun GlassFish Web Space Server 10.0 Administration Guide

Definition and Classification of Portal Resources

Web Space Server organizes portals and user resources as follows:

  1. Portals are accessed by Users.

  2. Users can be collected into User Groups.

  3. Users can belong to Organizations.

  4. Organizations can be grouped into hierarchies.

  5. Users, Groups, and Organizations can belong to Communities that have a common interest.

The simplest way to think about this is that you have users and various ways those users can be grouped together. Some of these groupings follow an administratively organized hierarchy, and other groupings might be done by the users themselves, such as different users from multiple organizations that have a common interest in dogs, starting a community called Dog Lovers. Other groupings can be done administratively through user groups or roles for other functions that might apply throughout the portal, such as a Message Board Administrators group made up of users from multiple communities and organizations who can administer any message board in the portal.

This way of organizing portal concepts is shown in the following figure.

Figure 5–1 Sun GlassFish Web Space Server Portal Resources

Sun GlassFish Web Space Server Portal Resources

In the figure, each arrow may be read as “can be a member of”. This means that Organizations can be members of Communities, Communities can be members of Roles, Users can be members of anything, and so on. This flexibility provides a powerful mechanism for portal administrators to configure portal resources and security.