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 the WebLogic Administration Portal to manage portal content and portal users, and to build portals with existing portal resources. A visitor is an end user of the portals assembled by portal administrators.

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 for ease of organization, more easily finding users, and for setting up Delegated Administration and Visitor Entitlements. 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), and you can 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, making it easier for you to manage those users. For more information about groups and subgroups, see the Overview of Group Hierarchy.

Administrators with full user/group management rights can add, remove, move, and change user profile properties on the users and groups in the WebLogic Administration Portal. User properties, such as address, phone number, social security number, and so on, can be used in setting up personalization and defining rules for Delegated Administration and Visitor Entitlements. For more on user information, see the Overview of User Profiles and Property Sets.

Multiple Authentication Providers

WebLogic Portal lets you access more than one user database (authentication provider), letting you select users and groups from multiple databases. For information on using more than one authentication provider, see Using Multiple Authentication Providers with WebLogic Portal.