System Administrator Help
System Administrator Help
Make sure you review all of the sections included in this topic. It will help you understand how groups and group hierarchies are structured within the ACM. There is also a section containing samples of group hierarchies.
All Active CM users are assigned to groups. Groups are the means by which you control which sites, portions of sites, groups or sites or individual pages a user can access. Group settings are also used to control who has access to digital assets, group creation and maintenance, and user creation and maintenance.
It is important to spend time planning how to implement your user groups. We suggest you consider the following when creating groups:
if you are using site groups, you will be creating distinct user groups for each site in each group. (see Site groups overview for more information)
Use your organizational chart to break your users out into departments/functional areas; what are the logical departmental or content areas of the organization; think about who the people are that will be performing tasks within each of those areas and what tasks will they be performing; for example:
Mary will be creating content for the Human Resources department. She will not be performing any other functions. So she will be assigned to a content provider group.
Mary will need access to the Digital Assets Manager, the Pagelets (Syndication) Manager but no other Admin Center functions.
organize the users into groups based on their rights to do certain things within the department - corresponding roughly to their hierarchical level within their department/functional area; decide who in the departments will create content, approve content or monitor content.
keep groups as discreet as possible - create more groups to allow for more domains of control rather than fewer.
Without use of site groups:
The following example shows a hypothetical ACM installation where there are multiple sites but all for the same corporation - ABC Companies. The default top-most level of folders - Groups - is created automatically. Then, for each site you create within your ACM (ABC Auto Parts and ABC Auto Service in the sample below), you would probably want to create a single Folder that would hold all sub-folders for that site.
Groups
ABC
Auto Parts Site
ABC Auto Parts content
approvers
John Smith
Bob Jackson
ABC Auto Parts content
monitors
Jane Donnally
Karl Rodgers
ABC Auto Parts content
providers
Betty White
Paul Smith
ABC
Auto Service Site
ABC Auto Service content
approvers
Helly Jantzen
Marg Smith
ABC Auto Service content
monitors
Kyle Jackson
Bob Johnston
ABC Auto Service content
providers
Betty Carlton
Bev Smith
With site groups enabled:
In this example, there is an additional layer in the hierarchy - the site groups - that are used to separate groups of sites used for organizations you wish to keep completely separate. For example, you might host websites for 3 separate organizations and want all data separate. This means you would have a site group for each organization and all of their sites would be kept in their own distinct site group.
ABC Group (this is a site
group)
ABC Auto Parts site (this
is a site within the site group)
ABC Parts approvers folder
user 1
user 2
ABC Parts monitors folder
user 3
user 4
ABC Parts providers folder
user 5
user 6
ABC Heavy Machinery Rentals
(this is a site within the site group)
ABC Heavy Machinery approvers
folder
ABC Heavy Machinery monitors
folder
ABC Heavy Machinery providers
folder
ABC Limousines (this
is a site within the site group)
ABC Limousines approvers
folder
ABC Limousines monitors
folder
ABC Limousines providers
folder
Hillside Group (this is a
site group)
Hillside Plumbing folder
(this is a site within the site group)
site 1 approvers folder
site 1 monitors folder
site 1 providers folder
Hillside Foundations
folder (this is a site within the site group)
site 2 approvers folder
site 2 monitors folder
site 2 providers folder
Hillside Home & Garden
Supply (this is a site within the site group)
site 3 approvers folder
site 3 monitors folder
site 3 providers folder
When site groups are used, site group administrators will create user groups within their own site group. The user groups they create will not have access to sites in any other site groups within the ACM installation.
If you are the ACM system administrator, you will notice that the Group Manager displays a high-level group folder for each site group you create. In the example below, the top-most group folder is the Groups folder. The ABC Companies Group is an automatically created site group folder. When the site group administrator creates groups, they will be within that folder.
When site group managers open the Group Manager, the top-most group folder in the hierarchy will be the one for their site group. In the example below, the ABC Companies Groups administrator is viewing the Group Manager. Note that the top-level folder no longer says Groups but is the name of the Site Group - ABC Companies Groups.
When creating groups you should proceed as follows:
Create group folders that correspond to your site groups, sites, departments, sections, or functional areas of your organization (e.g. Finance, Sales & Marketing, Human Resources, Research, Product Development. If you have a large organization, you may want to create 2 levels of folders. See Creating group folders.
The first level of folders you create will all be under the top-level Groups folder.
The folders you create first should correspond to departments, sections, or functional areas of your organization (e.g. Finance, Sales & Marketing, Human Resources, Research, Product Development).
If you have a large organization, you may want to create another level of folders within each of your departmental folders (e.g. Human Resources Managers, Human Resources Administration).
Create groups within your folders (e.g. Within the Finance folder, you may want to create groups corresponding to those who will be creating content, those who will be approving content and those who will be monitoring changes to content). For example HR Content Providers. See Creating groups.
Add users to the group.
Give the new group access to one or more of your web sites.
Select the Admin Center features/functions that you want the group to have access to.
If you give the group access to the User Manager, use the User Domain tab to select the user folders they will be allowed to access (which groups of users they can manage).
If you give the group access to the Digital Assets Manager, use the Asset Domain tab to select the digital asset folders that the users in this group will have access to.
If you give the group access to the Syndication Manager, use the Pagelets tab to select the folders of pagelets that these users will have access to.
Review the Page Types permissions on the Page Types tab.
On the HTML tab, set which HTML editor tools this group will have access to when editing web content.