Social Office Architecture

Before we dive into the user interface for adding and maintaining various resources, it's best to go over the concepts Social Office uses to organize itself.

Users

Users are accounts on the system which are accessed by real people. Users can be collected in multiple ways. They can be members of sites which draw together common interests. They can have roles which describe their functions in the system, and these roles can be scoped by Portal or Site. They can also be collected into User Groups.

Roles

There are two kinds of roles:

• Portal Roles

• Site Roles

These are called role scopes. Roles are used to define permissions across their scope: across the portal or across a site. For example, consider a role which grants access to create a Message Board category. A Portal role would grant that access across the portal, wherever there was a Message Board portlet. A Site role would grant that access only within a single site.

Because Roles are used strictly for security, they also don't have pages, like Sites.

Users or Sites can be members of a role.

Sites

Sites are collections of Users who have a common interest. There are two types of Sites:

• Open

• Private

An Open Site (the default) allows Social Office users to join and leave the Site whenever they want to, using the Control Panel or a Sites portlet added to a page to which they have access. A Private site requires that users be added to the Site by a site administrator and doesn't show up at all in the Sites portlet or the Control Panel.

User Groups

User Groups are simple, arbitrary collections of users, created by administrators. They can be members of sites or roles. Permissions cannot be assigned to User Groups. Though User Groups don't have pages sites, they do have page templates which can be used to customize users' personal sets of pages. This is fully described below.