Roles, permissions, access level

Another important aspect of a portal project relates to user access control. In this section we will discuss this topic from two perspectives — access to portal and portlet resources.

We found it important to discuss this topic in this chapter, because this is an area that you should address early in the design phase of your portal solution. The sooner you define how different users will be accessing your application, the better. In fact, this aspect of a portal application comes into play even before the solution design phase. This subject needs to be first addressed when the business analysis team writes the requirements and use cases for the entire solution.

In this section we will not discuss the role of the business analysis team in the overall project, but it is suffice to say that Business Analysts need to understand and clearly convey the defined roles, their access level to portal resources, and how the application is supposed to behave when a given...