User Management Basics

Contelligents User Management is an advanced technology that allows pluggable authentication mechanisms. Contelligent's security model supports fine granular component access control. All standard features like group and role support are included in contelligent's access control model.

The standard install ships with a single user group configured that uses the contelligent intern authentication mechanisms and gathers its data from a build-in user database.

Without going into further details on howto set up a user group or change the default authentication mechanism we will show how basic user management operations are integrated with contelligent. The user interface provided by the user management module is as follows:

This tutorial provides a brief introduction for managing typical user administration tasks:

• Managing Users (create, remove)
• Managing Roles (create, remove)

Managing Users

Basic Managing Tasks described in this section include: Creating Users, Removing Users & Setting User Passwords.

Create Users

To create a user, log in as admin and switch to the User Management Tab in your contelligent client (see screenshot above). To actually perform user administration tasks you first have to enter the edit mode for the user management client module. After this, press the 'New User' toolbutton to bring up the user wizard. The wizard allows you to set a) the user name, b) the full name and c) the initial passwort of your new user. In order to create a user that belongs to a specific user group, select the user group in the users panel of the user management module before you press the create user toolbutton. Finally, commit the changes you did in the user management module to activate your changes.

Remove Users

Removing users is quite simple. Nevertheless take care that all privatly owned components must be wiped out in advance. Otherwise those components will become orphans with only the admin having the right to remove or modify them.

Change Password

Changing Passwords can be done in the User Administration Dialog. This is only a good idea in the case a user forgot to change the password. Typically the user is responsible to change his password on his own through the standard client change password mechanism.

Managing Roles

Managing permission can be a quite cumbersome task if you need to administer access control lists on a per user basis. To reduce the complexity of managing your permissions, contelligent implements a flexible roles concept. This sections shows you howto create and remove defined roles as well as howto associate or unassociated roles to users.

Create a Role

To create a role, you have to go to the User Management screen and switch to edit mode. After that you can add a new role to a role group of your choice. In order to do so, select the role group you want your new role to be created in and press the create role button. Choose a name you want to use for your new rolegroup and press that commit button in order to activate your changes.

Delete a Role

To delete a role you have to go to the User Management screen and switch to edit mode. After that you can select a role in the panel in the top left corner and press the Remove Role Button to remove the selected role from the defined roleset. Saving the changes will finally remove the role from the system.

Role Assignment

One of the most important tasks when talking about role and user management is the actual assignment of roles to users. Contelligents User Management dialog provides you with an intuitive and easy to use solution to perform this most critical task. You just have to select the user you want to modify the role-set for and add or roles using the arrow buttons between the role-group panel in the left bottom corner and the user-role panel on the right.

See also