The Control Panel

The Control Panel takes you to the administrative functions of Social Office. Only Administrators will have access to the Control Panel.

Navigating the Control Panel

The Control Panel is very easy to navigate. On the left side is a list of headings with functions underneath them. The headings are in alphabetical order, but the functions are in a logical order.

User Name: The first section is always the logged in user's personal space. Here, you can change your account information.

Portal: The Portal section allows portal administrators to set up and maintain the portal. This is where you can add and edit users, roles, and configure the settings of the portal.

Server: The Server section contains administrative functions for configuring portal instances and more.

Illustration 5: Control PanelAll of the functions that you'll need to maintain social office can be found in the control panel.

Using the Control Panel

The Portal section of the Control Panel is used for most administrative tasks. This is where you'll find the interface for the creation and maintenance of

• Users: These are individuals in Social Office who are representative of actual people. They are assigned a screen name and a password in order to login to Social Office.

• Roles: Roles are groupings of users that share a particular function within Social Office according to a particular scope. In Social Office there are two scopes that roles can take. The first is a site role. This is a role that has permissions that are applicable only within the site that it's assigned to, such as the Marketing Site. The second is a regular role. The permissions associated with this role are effective throughout social office and not just within one particular site.

Additionally, it allows you to configure many server settings, including:

• Password Policies: If you (as an admin) have certain password requirements, a password policy is where you would enforce this. Some examples of password policy settings are allowing a user to change his own password, preventing reuse of old passwords, enabling password expiration after a specified time, and enabling account lockout after a certain number of failed logins. These are just some of the settings that can be set and managed with a password policy.

• Authentication options, including Single Sign-On and LDAP integration. Social Office currently supports several single sign-on solutions including, LDAP, CAS, NTLM, OpenID, Open SSO, and SiteMinder. Social Office also supports any LDAP directory including but not limited to Apache Directory, Fedora Directory, Microsoft Active Directory, Novell eDirectory and OpenLDAP.

• Default User Associations: There are two types of default user associations in Social Office: sites and roles. If you want every newly created user associated with a particular site you would list the name of that site under Sites. If you want every newly created user associated with a particular role you would list the name of that role under Roles.

• Reserved Screen names: Allows Social Office admins to set aside certain screen names that they don't want users to use. This is beneficial if you want to restrict users from creating screen names that contain bad words for example.

• Mail Host Names: You have already configured one mail host for sending notifications. You can optionally specify other mail hosts for sending mail in case the main one you configured becomes unavailable.

• Email Notifications: There are two types of email notifications that you can configure. Account Created Notification will alert a user that an account was created in Social Office using their email address. You can customize the message that's sent to the newly created user. The Password Changed Notification lets a Social Office user know when their password is changed and what it's changed to. Just as with the Account Created Notification, you can customize the message that's sent to the user.

You'll use the Portal section of the Control Panel to create your structure, implement security, and administer your users. Please see Chapter 4 for an exhaustive view of the Control Panel.