CoreMedia CMS has some groups and users for standard operation (so called built-in users/groups see Section 3.15.1, “Predefined Users and Groups”, such as workflow) on the Content Management Server. You can add users and groups to administrate access rights on the content. CoreMedia distinguishes between content and live groups. Groups which have rules valid on the Content Management Server and groups which have rules valid on the Live Server respectively.

Example:

You create a news site which offers content in the categories sports, politics, economy and gossip. Your editorial staff contains 20 editors, 5 for each category. Each editor has only access to content of his specific field. So you need to administrate at least 4 additional groups and 20 users on the Content Management Server each group with different access rights.

You can either administrate these users and groups using the built-in user administration of Studio or you can connect the CoreMedia system to an existing LDAP server. Therefore, CoreMedia CMS supports any LDAP server. Because LDAP has no obvious concept for content and live groups CoreMedia CMS provides a UserProvider class (see Section 3.12.3, “LdapUserProvider” and the Javadoc). This class differentiates between live and content groups. CoreMedia provides the predefined ActiveDirectoryUserProvider to connect to an Active Directory server. If you use an Active Directory server you have the possibility to define all groups of this server as Live Server groups, Content Management Server groups or both using the properties

cap.server.userproviders[#].ldap.content-management-groups=true
cap.server.userproviders[#].ldap.live-groups=true

in the contentserver application properties.

If you want to connect to another LDAP server you can extend the LdapUserProvider class for your own user provider (see Section 3.12.3, “LdapUserProvider” and the Javadoc).

Groups need to be connected with rules in order to have impact. In the example above, the group sport might have a rule which allows a member to read and write content from and into the sports folder. Use the User Manager of Studio to add rules to your groups. Read Section 3.15.2, “User Rights Management” for details on rights and rules.