This chapter provides an overview of Delegated Management. In particular, it discusses:

An overall view of Delegated Management and the Delegated Management Console and its terminology.

The individual roles and responsibilities of those who administer and use the Delegated Management Console.

The requirements needed to begin administering and using the Delegated Management Console.

The user model described throughout this manual.

What is Delegated Management?

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) runs the Sun Internet Mail Server (SIMS) that provides you with all the e-mail facilities necessary for your domain. In the Internet, a domain is a part of a naming hierarchy. Syntactically, a domain name consists of a sequence of names (labels) separated by periods (dots) that appear to the right of the @ sign in an e-mail address, for example, stream.com. In general, a domain is used as an administrative partition of a complex distributed system. For example, all the e-mail users in our scenario belong to the stream.com domain.

The Delegated Management Console provides you with the means of administering the e-mail users and groups within your domain. The person or people who administer your domain are known as delegated administrators. The delegated administrator is designated this role by the ISP when the domain is created. Essentially, the ISP administrator (the SIMS administrator) "delegates" some e-mail administration to the delegated administrator. All members of the domain are known as e-mail users. E-mail users are allowed to self-administer a set of personal attributes and any distribution lists that they own.

Interfaces

The delegated administrator performs the tasks using the Delegated Management Console or the command line interfaces.

Delegated Management Console

The Delegated Management Console is a web-based interface that allows you to perform tasks on user accounts and distribution lists.

FIGURE 1-1 is an example of the Delegated Management Console home page for the delegated administrator:

FIGURE  1-1 Delegated Management Console Home Page

Command Line Interfaces

The delegated administrator can also perform some of the tasks using command line interfaces (CLI). A UNIX shell account is needed in order to execute the CLIs. The SIMS administrator at the ISP should provide you with a UNIX shell account if you are to perform any tasks using the CLIs. See Chapter 3, "User Administration" and Chapter 4, "Distribution List Administration" for the appropriate CLI that corresponds to each task in the Delegated Management Console.

In order to use any of the CLIs, you should be familiar with UNIX and have some UNIX experience.

Roles

Five types of users have access to the Delegated Management Console:

Delegated administrators: assigned this role by the SIMS administrator from the ISP. This person is a member of the domain. The delegated administrator has a complete set of rights and authorities within the domain and can perform all operations on all entries.

Distribution list owners: assigned by the delegated administrator to maintain a given distribution list. Distribution list owners have the authority to maintain all aspects of a distribution list including deletion but cannot create one nor assign an owner to one.

Distribution list moderators: approves messages that are sent to a distribution list. Moderators forward any approved messages to the members of the distribution list. Moderators to not need to be a member of the distribution list.

Distribution list members: members of a distribution list.

E-mail users: members of the domain. E-mail users have the authority to edit a set of their own attributes.

While specific distinctions exist between the above Delegated Management Console users, they can also overlap. For example, delegated administrators can be distribution list owners, and everybody is an e-mail user. The following table can help to distinguish the tasks.

TABLE  1-1   Delegated Management Roles

	create user	edit user	create distribution list	edit distribution list	approves distribution list messages	join distribution lists	edit personal preferences
Delegated administrator	x	x	x	x		x	x
Distribution list owner				x		x	x
Distribution list moderator					x	x	x
Distribution list member						x	x
E-mail user						x	x

The above tasks and roles are described in further detail in Chapter 3, "User Administration" Chapter 4, "Distribution List Administration" and Chapter 5, "Personal Preferences."

What Do I Need to Get Started?

Before you can begin using the Delegated Management Console, you should:

Have access to an HTML 2.0 compliant browser or higher.

Know the name of your domain.

Know the name of the machine that is running your mail server.

Know your login ID and password.

User Model

Throughout this manual, we will be referring to specific scenarios. These scenarios will be used in the examples. To help illustrate the scenarios, we have created a user model. This user model should help to make the examples understandable and consistent.

For our user model, we present a fictitious ISP named Bridge Communications. Bridge Communications is a rapidly expanding ISP company that offers customers Internet services, including Delegated Management. One of Bridge Communications customers is Stream Corporation, another fictitious company. Stream Corp. is a medical group with 150 employees.

Bridge provides the e-mail server services for Stream. The domain name for Stream is: stream.com.

Stream's customer requirements are:

150 E-mail accounts for their employees

Ownership and control of 3 electronic distribution lists:

Medical News: monthly newsletter and other medical information

Physician News: internal company-confidential news for physicians only

All Employee News: newsletter for all employees

Specific roles and duties are set up within the stream.com domain and discussed throughout this manual:

TABLE  1-2   stream.com Roles

Name	Role/Duty	User ID
Sarah Jones	Delegated administrator. Distribution list owner for All Employee News distribution list.	sjones
Rhett Green	Distribution list owner for Medical News and Physician News distribution lists.	rgreen
Lori Chen	Distribution list moderator for Medical News distribution list	lchen
Nigel Richards	Distribution list moderator for Physician News distribution list	nrichards
Rachel Gonzalez	E-mail user	rachelg
Brad Macduff	E-mail user	macduff
James Macdonald	E-mail user	macdonald
Mike Sato	E-mail user	spider
Sydney Mills	E-mail user	smills

The responsibilities of each person will be described in detail throughout this manual.