3 niveaux du plus large au plus restreint :

1. Portail
2. Site
3. Organisation ?????

Organizations

Le concept d'organisation est utilisé pour représenter une hiérarchie d'utilisateur.

L'école, ce sont des départements et des services   au sein d'de personnes et donc  represent hierarchical structures of users such as those of companies, businesses, non-profit organizations, churches, schools, and clubs.

Organizations and suborganization hierarchies can be created to unlimited levels. Users can be members of one or many organizations. The rights of an organization administrator apply both to his/her organization and to any child organizations. By default, members of child organizations are implicit members of their parent organizations. This means, for example, that members of child organizations can access the private pages of their parent organizations. This behavior can be customized in your portal’s portal-ext.properties configuration file.

Since organizations are designed for distributed user administration, organization administrators have an entirely different set of privileges than site administrators. Site administrators are responsible for the pages, portlets, and content of their site. They are also responsible for managing the membership of their site. To this end, they can set the membership type to Open, Restricted, or Private. They can also add users to or remove users from their site but cannot manage the users themselves. Organization administrators, on the other hand, can edit users belonging to their organization or any suborganization. They cannot add existing users to their organization but they can create new users within their organization. Only portal administrators can add existing users to an organization.

Many simple portal designs don’t use organizations at all; they only use sites (see chapters 2 and 3 for more information on sites). Remember that the main purpose of organizations is to allow for distributed user management. They allow portal administrators to delegate some of their user management responsibilities to organization administrators. If you don’t anticipate needing to delegate user management responsibilities, your portal design need not include organizations. In order to decide whether or not your portal design should include organization, think about your portal’s function. A simple photo-sharing web site, for example, could be powered by sites only. On the other hand, organizations are useful for corporations or educational institutions since their users can easily be placed into a hierarchical structure. In fact, organizations in Liferay are designed to model any group hierarchy, from those of government agencies all the way down to those of small clubs. Of course, users can belong both to organizations and to independent sites. For example, a corporation or educational institution could create a social networking site open to all portal users, even ones from separate organizations.

Additionally, organization administrators can assign organization-scoped roles to members of their organization. For example, consider an IT Security group in a corporate setting. You could have a suborganizaton of your IT organization that handles security for all of the applications company-wide. If you grant the IT Security organization the portal administrator role, all the members of the organization would have administrative access to the entire portal. Suppose further that a user in this organization was later hired by the Human Resources department. The simple act of removing the user from the IT Security organization also removes the user’s administrative privileges, since the privilege came from the IT Security organization’s role. By adding the user to the HR organization, any roles the HR organization has (such as access to a benefits system in the portal) are transferred to the user. In this manner, you can design your portal to correspond with your existing organization chart and users’ permissions are granted according to their positions in the chart.

Of course, this is only one way to design it. If you have more complex requirements for permissions within an organization, you can create custom organization-scoped roles to assemble the permissions you wish to grant to particular users. Alternatively, you could consider attaching a site to your organization and using site teams to assemble the sets of permissions (see below). We’ll discuss roles and permissions in more detail later in this chapter.

Does your organization need to have its own site? Many organizations don’t, but since some do, Liferay allows sites to be attached to organizations. If an organization has an attached site, the organization’s administrators are treated as the site administrators of the attached site. This means that they can manage the pages, portlets, and content of the site as well as the users of the organization. Members of an organization with an attached site are treated as members of the organization’s site. This means that they can access the private pages of the organization’s site, along with any portlets or content there. The capability of attaching sites to organizations allows portal administrators to use organizations to facilitate distributed portal administration, not just distributed user administration. Next, let’s learn how to create and manage organizations.

To add an organization, click the Users and Organizations link in the Control Panel. Then click the Add button and choose Regular Organization. To attach a site when you create an organization, click on Organization Site at the right and check the Create Site box. If you don’t know right now if your organization needs a site, that’s fine. You can always add one later if the need arises.

Figure 16.4: Adding a new organization is easy. Once you’ve clicked Save to create the organization, you can specify additional details about the organization.

Name: Enter a name for the organization.

Type: Choose whether this is a regular organization or a location. A location cannot have any suborganizations.

Parent Organization: Select an organization in the system to be the direct parent of the organization you are creating. Click the Remove button to remove the currently configured parent.

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Tip: By creating an organization, you automatically become both a member and receive the Organization Owner role, which gives you full administrative rights within the organization. This means that you can, for example, appoint other users to be organization administrators or organization owners. Organization owners are equivalent to organization administrators except that they can assign the Organization Owner and Organization Administrator roles to other users; they can also remove the memberships of other Organization Administrators or Owners. Organization administrators can’t make these role assignments and can’t manage the memberships of other Organization Administrators or Owners.

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Fill out the information for your organization and click Save. As when creating a new user, after you click Save to submit the form, a success message appears along with a new form which lets you enter additional information about the organization. Organizations can have multiple email addresses, postal addresses, web sites, and phone numbers associated with them. The Services link can be used to indicate the operating hours of the organization, if any.

For now, click on the Back icon. This takes you back to the list of organizations. Click the Actions button next to the new organization you created. This shows a list of actions you can perform on this organization.

Edit: lets you specify details about the organization, including addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and websites.

Manage Site: lets you create and manage the public and private pages of the organization’s site. This only appears for organizations that have attached sites.

Assign Organization Roles: lets you assign organization-scoped roles to users. By default, Organizations are created with three roles: Organization Administrator, Organization User and Organization Owner. You can assign one or more of these roles to users in the organization. All members of the organization automatically get the Organization User role so this role is hidden when you click Assign Organization Roles.

Assign Users: lets you search and select users in the portal to be assigned to this organization as members.

Add User: adds a new user in the portal and assigns the user as a member of this organization.

Add Regular Organization: lets you add a child organization to this organization. This is how you create hierarchies of organizations with parent-child relationships.

Add Location: lets you add a child Location, which is a special type of organization that cannot have any children added to it.

Delete: removes this organization from the portal. Make sure the organization has no users in it first.

If you click the View button at the top of the Users and Organizations page and select View Hierarchy you can view both a list of users who are members of this organization and a list of all the suborganizations of this organization.

Users can join or be assigned to sites when they share a common interest. Users can be assigned to organizations when they fit into a hierarchical structure. Users groups provide a more ad hoc way to group users than sites and organizations. Let’s look at them next.