Different administrators may have different roles. For example, perhaps one administrator accepts responsibility for understanding Forum architecture and troubleshooting on the system level. Another person may take responsibility for any application programming necessary to implement customizations that cannot be done from the Forum administration menus. A third person (or group of people) may be assigned to perform some of the easier administrative tasks by using Forum administration menus from their browsers, which would include creating and deleting forums, or adding new users. Finally, you can create a cascaded summit and "hand down" administrative responsibilities for that set of forums to another person or persons.
This topic provides you with high-level background information that administrators need to know in order to perform routine administrative tasks. It describes the different levels of Forum administration, how to define access policies for groups of users, how to use the Forum access control list (ACL) table, a tip on how to back up the Forum system files, and how to use cascaded summits.
If you are a first-time administrator and you need to understand the basic tasks needed to set up Forum, you may want to begin by reading the Quick Start guide on Initial Set Up of Forum. That guide provides an easy-to-use list of steps needed to get your installation of Forum up and running.
The next topic is a guide to customizing the SiteScape Forum. In recent releases of Forum, we have provided a wide variety of methods for changing the look, feel, and features. We have added administrative menus to the Discussion and Document-Sharing (Docshare) forums that allow you to make customizations that, in previous versions, required Tcl coding in the .class files. This topic describes the types of customizations that many of you might want to make and provides pointers to information about how to perform those customizations.
The next two topics provide reference information on how to perform customizations to Docshare forum commands and on how to use the Docshare Workflow features.
The next topic provides an extensive reference to all of the administrative menus in Forum and how to use these features.
Finally, the last administrative topic includes information for those of you who need to use the command-line in order to make sure that Forum processes and other software are running properly. It includes an overview of the Forum architecture, information on how to access Forum tools from the command line, and on trouble shooting. (Again, in recent versions of Forum, we have tried to create more administrative menu items to perform tasks that, in previous versions, required work on the command-line level.)
You can perform administrative tasks on three levels: on the summit level, on an individual forum level, and on an entry level.
Administrators at the summit level are able to perform tasks that affect who can access the summit vista page, what they see on that page, and how all the summit's forums behave. These administrative tasks include creating forums, deleting forums, modifying access-control privileges for a team's members, modifying user-registration information, adding registered users, creating cascading summits (cascading summits are to summits as subfolders are to folders), and so forth.
Summit-level administrators are also able to perform tasks at both the forum and document/topic (or entry) level. By default, the first and only summit-level administrator is the wf_admin user. The person using this username can grant summit-level administration rights to other registered users by adding them to the SSF Adminnistrators group.
The wf_admin user can also assign rights to registered users that allow them to perform administration tasks for a designated newsstand, calendar, or discussion and document-sharing forum that can be accessed from the summit page. These people perform administration tasks at the forum level, and they are also called forum administrators. Registered users who have the right to perform forum-level adminstration can perform tasks such as defining polling options for a discussion, defining global keywords for a document, specifying a news source for a summit-level newsstand, and changing a summit-level calendar's view from a monthly view to a daily view. Forum-level adminstrators can also perform administration tasks on the entry level.
Registered users are allowed to perform administration tasks on items (or entries) that they create. Administration tasks on this level include deleting the user's own folders, documents, topics, or replies; setting the user's own topic to be hidden; deleting a user's own news article; and modifying the profile of a folder created by that user.
Team pages provide a special work space in which all team members can perform administrative tasks (including changing team properties and administering their own applications). For example, in a discussion and document-sharing forum on the summit level, a typical user cannot define global keywords. In a discussions and documents forum on a team vista page, any team member can define global keywords. The only task that a team member cannot perform is changing the access-control policy of the team; only the summit-level administrators can change this policy.
Whoever logs in as the wf_admin user has administration rights at the summit level; the first person to use the wf_admin username is usually the person who installed the SiteScape Forum. The wf_admin user can add registered users to the SSF Administrators group, thereby granting them administration rights at the summit level. The wf_admin user can also add registered users to a Forum Owner group for individual forum, thereby granting them administration rights at the forum level.
Similarly, members of the SSF Adminstration group other than wf_admin can also assign registered members to either the SSF Administration group or to a Forum Owner group for a given forum.
By default, the person who creates the forum becomes a member of the Forum Owner group for that forum. So, the person who creates the forum is the first and, at that time, the only forum-level administrator. A member of a forum's Forum Owner group can add other registered users to the group. Or, if the owner chooses, the forum owner can create another group (for example, Forum Administrators) and can specify that group as having administrative privileges for a given forum. In this way, the Forum Owner can have the most administrative privileges, and the Forum Administrators can have a subset of those privileges (for example, privileges to do everything except delete folders).
In order to grant someone full administrative rights at the summit level, you need to make modifications in two places on the "Administration Tools for..." page. First, click on the Control Access to User Database hyperlink under the Manage Users section, and modify the access controls. Then click on the Control Access to Summit and Administration Tools hyperlink under the Manage Summit section, and modify those access controls. If you choose, you can assign rights to different groups in both of these places, but, most often, you will probably want to grant both of these sets of rights to the same group of people. (See the next section for details on how to modify access controls.)
On the Control Access to User Database page, you can assign the right to add users, to modify user registration information, and so forth. On the Control Access to Administration Tools, you can assign the right to use all the hyperlinks on the "Administration Tools for..." page (create forums, delete forums, and so forth) and the right to alter access rights to the summit administration tools.
To assign registered users to perform adminstrative tasks at the forum level, you can either use the Tools button in the forum in which you want to assign them administration rights, or you can click on the Manage Forum Properties and Access Control hyperlink on the "Administration Tools for..." page under the Manage Forums section, and then click on the name of the forum to which you want to assign administration privileges or modify properties. To assign administrator privileges for a forum, click on the Access Control hyperlink.
The next page of this Help file provides more details about changing access controls.