Setting up Users - Best Practices

Question

03/28/2007 11:53:42 AM
Reply | Quote | Top | Bottom
Hi there. We are a large organization with a website
consisting of over 40,000 pages. We have multiple users who need
access to various parts of the website. We have discovered
different methods of setting them up in Contribute but wonder if
one method is better than the others.
1. Create a separate new connection for each portion of the
site. This, unfortunately, makes it impossible to share CSS layout
files, images, and library items at the root of the website.
2. Create a single connection to the server and create
mutliple roles - most likely named by the user's name - that limits
directory access. Worried this might create an unwieldly list of
users. This opens up shared assets, though, which will help with
maintaining site standards.
We also tried creating a single connection to the server and
creating new roles - named according to which directory was being
given access to - but quickly discovered that a user can only be
assigned to one role.
Has anyone else run across this?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Well, I definitely think that if you're going to maintain any
level of sanity to your web file organization, you'll have to set
up roles according to logical groupings and then assign folks to
those roles. I would not mess with creating a variety of
connections because that could easily turn into an authentication
nightmare. Stick to one encrypted connection.
The nature of your business organization should dictate how
those role groups are created, for example a role for HR, Finance
or Sales with a corresponding folder on the site. But it might be
possible to do the opposite and create roles based on how your
website is organized. For example, you might have a "Sales" section
on your web site that folks from different departments need to have
edit access to, and another section on your site that deals with
"Administration" that may necessitate adding folks from, again,
different departments within the organization. This is a bit
opposite of the normal routine of setting up role groups based on
the groups that already exist in the organization (HR, Finance,
Sales, etc.).
For us, it was fairly easy to create the groups because we're
a school system and the site is organized by school sites.
It would be great if folks could be assigned to multiple
roles, but it could get messy with the "cascading" of permissions
(i.e. permissions in this role but NOT in that role, however the
second role is a sub-group of role one....see what I mean?).
In the end, you may just need to graph out the type of
organization you need in order to meet the needs of the site and/or
organization. Then replicate that in how you set up roles in CPS.
Hope this helps!