Caution

CoreMedia Live Server Group management is not used anymore and has therefore been deprecated.

CoreMedia is planning to remove Live Server Group management together with Site Manager from the product portfolio with the next major release.

CoreMedia CMS needs some groups and users for standard operation (so called built-in users/groups see Section 3.15.1, “Predefined Users and Groups”, for example publisher) on the Live Server. These groups and users are created when the server starts for the first time. In addition to these built-in groups you can add business oriented users and groups. With these groups you administrate access rights on the delivered content. You define the users who are allowed to read content.

Example:

You create a news site which offers standard content for registered customers, gold content for paying customers and platinum content for customers paying even more. The customers might sum up to 100.000. So you need to have at least 3 groups (such as standard, gold, platinum) on the Live Server containing 100.000 user.

It's as likely as not that your company administrates these users on an 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

com.coremedia.ldap.contentgroups=true
com.coremedia.ldap.livegroups=true

in the properties/corem/jndi.properties file.

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).

You must not change the LdapUserProvider after starting the content server with LDAP user authentication. If, for example, you have defined content groups first, and change this to content and live groups later, the live server will not notice this change.

Groups and users or memberships of groups and users are not published or replicated so you have to administrate them individually on each server. There is only one exception to this rule:

Assume, you have a resource with a rule connected to a group and this group does not exist on the Live Server. If you publish this resource, a group with the same name will be created on the Live Server. This group has no members and is no member of another group. It's only a placeholder so that the rule is connected to something, which you have to populate with memberships.

Groups need to be connected with rules in order to have impact. In the example above, the group platinum might have a rule which allows members to read content contained in the platinum folder. For your convenience rules are administrated on the Content Management Server and are published and replicated. Therefore, the Content Management Server needs to know the groups used on the Live Server. The easiest way to achieve consistency between the two server types is to use the same LDAP server with the same UserProvider configuration. You can also use different LDAP server but you have to ensure that the Live Groups on Live Server and Content Management Server are the same. Groups are identified by their name and domain so this has to be identical on both servers.

If you have provided the Live Server groups to the Content Management Server, you can use the User Administration Window of the Site Manager to add rules to the groups. Live Server groups are identified by their checked Live Server Group checkbox. A rule will appear on the Live Server not until a resource connected to the rule has been published. To maintain data integrity only READ rights are allowed on the Live Server.