Overview of Users and Groups

The WebLogic Administration Portal supports management of two primary types of users: portal administrators and portal end users (visitors). An administrator uses these administration tools to manage portal content and portal users, and to build portals with existing portal resources. A visitor is an end-user of the portal built with these tools.

As an administrator of users, you can combine users into user groups to simplify management and administration of users. Groups allow you to create logical groupings of users so you can classify several users at one time with similar entitlements and segments. The ability to group users allows you to deal with large sets of users at one time.

A child group is a subset of a higher-level group (parent). A subgroup inherits the properties of the parent group but can contain unique properties. The system at large allows you to model your organizational hierarchy into a collection of groups and subgroups to whatever depth you need. This makes it easy for you to structure your users into groups and subgroups that look like your organization, thus making it easier for you to manage those users. For more information about groups and subgroups, see the Overview of Group Hierarchy.

Administrators need to know who has access to the particular resources and must be able to change this access to suit the demands of the applications. This includes adding, removing, and changing the users and groups using the administration tools or using external systems.

In the case of the Unified User Profile (UUP), the user profile properties will be stored in an external system. You can use pre-existing users and groups in an existing portal database or in an external system such as an LDAP server. For more information on user information, see the Overview of User Profiles and Property Sets.