Forum OpenACS Q&A: Intranet permissions and groups

Posted by Scott Mc Williams on 09/12/00 11:35 PM

I'm working with the Intranet module a LOT lately. I'm wondering if there's any good source for what users need what permissions (or what groups they need to belong to) to do what they want?

For example...

I'm the big time administrator dude, so I can do anything I want. That's easy
Andrew is a manager level person who should be able to create projects, add customers, create ticket tracker instances and do any editing needed to those same items. He should also be able to close issues in the ticket tracker module.
James is an employee who needs to be able to enter tickets, respond to tickets and see any company info.
Frank is a customer of ours who should be able to log in, see who's assigned to work on his project and see the status of tickets. He should also be able to enter new tickets.
Holly is our HR person. She needs to log in a see everyone's billable hours and bill that to the customers.

These are just rough examples, but you can see what I'm talking about. Each of the people above needs to be in certain groups. I could make everyone the grand poobah level that I seem to be at, but that's not good for many obvious reasons.

I was wondering if there is a big group of Intranet users, maybe we should band together somewhere and create some decent documentation of this. I'm trying to evangelize ACS and OpenACS to my company and this is our first step. So...anyone else using Intranet?

Scott

2: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Talli Somekh on 09/13/00 12:22 AM

we're using the intranet on our server as well, and we've found this topic to be a bit confusing as well. it seems that aD kinda did exactly what they said they did; they needed an intranet and hacked something up that basically looks and works just as they want it to. unfortunately, it doesn't seem like they worked all the kinks out and documented everything very clearly.

i think, though, that it's a great beginning. if the docs you're talking about don't exist, then i would be really interested in helping build them. also, i'd like to see and help an effort to really improving this module, based on how it comes out in 4.0 of course.

talli

3: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 09/13/00 02:08 AM

I'm in exactly the same boat, and would love to join this fledgling group. I'm about to write up a list of things you have to do to get Intranet working AFTER the install, which is completely neglected in the docs. I'd love to split up the work on documenting this and create an "intranet" group that can help get everything running for each other and provide some decent documentation!

4: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Niall Gilsenan on 09/13/00 10:39 AM

Not to discourage you Scott but I have been working on the intranet module (on and off) over the last couple of months. I wanted to do something similar to what you wanted to do as well. Employees should have basic rights to view projects and add reports but not add allocations or payments to them. My general thinking was that a basic employee can view things but not do much modification, project supervisors should be able to allocate payments and add or remove employees from a project etc.

As it stands I found no way to achieve this. I looked at using permissions of some sort but to no avail. Finally the simplest way to do this seemed to be to take the links for project allocations out of the page which is not satisfactory at all.

I switched over from Openacs to ACS recently and found no real difference in the way this approached. You just seem to have a choice of making a user a superuser with access to lots of things or an authorised user with access to very little.

I'm hoping ACS4 may be more capable in this regard as my understanding is that you will be able to set permissions for just about everything.

Not much help I know, but with luck someone can prove me wrong.

5: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Richard Li on 09/13/00 03:03 PM

I'm not sure if it's been ported to OpenACS yet, but have you looked at the general permissions module? The module lets you attach row-level permissions to any table. So, in the intranet case, you could define a set of permissions "view", "modify", "allocate", etc. and attach these permissions to the rows in the intranet table(s). Then you could attach user-groups/users to these permissions/rows.

The ACS4 permissions mechanism provides a similar mechanism, but in a more general way. However, the general principles are the same. If you're interested, please check out the ACS4 Project Central page and take a look at the permissions requirements and design documents.

6: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Michael Feldstein on 09/13/00 03:07 PM

At some point, somewhere on this site, Adam Farkas posted a comment that the intranet module was going to be one of the early new modules for 4.0. aD figures that it could make the ACS a useful out-of-the-box package if they get the intranet working right. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

7: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 09/13/00 06:42 PM

Adam's posting

8: Wow! (response to 1)

Posted by Scott Mc Williams on 09/13/00 09:46 PM

Looks like I touched a nerve! Glad to see I'm not the only one in the dark. Now, I should point out that I'm much more a usability guy than a programmer type. So my comments and concerns are more directed towards making it easier for people to set up and use. Which seems to be the main problem here, since the functionality seems to be in place.

Let me know how I can help for now! Besides whining and complaining! heheh

Scott

9: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 09/13/00 09:57 PM

Funny, I'm a usability guy myself :) but I do have some programming background. I'll keep hammering away at it. Is anybody actually using this? It seems unusable right now... How different is this that the Classic ACS 3.42 release?

10: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Ben Adida on 09/13/00 09:59 PM

Yes, OpenForce is using the Intranet. There are some features we do not use, for sure, but we are using it. The module needs significant improvement, but it's a decent start, IMHO.

11: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Chris Hardy on 09/13/00 10:06 PM

Like I said in the other thread, I'm busy stamping out bugs, and if any of you want, I can send out patches. It's all been applied to the CVS tree. Alot of it comes down to the time I can devote to it, and the fact that I'm new to tcl. Arsdigita seems willing to help and it will only be a matter of time till it all looks nice, and plays well with others(tm).

12: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 09/13/00 10:28 PM

Chris, if you could put these patches up somewhere, I'd really appreciate it. It is important enough to me that it would make a difference between me choosing OpenACS and ClassicExpensive ACS.

If there's a way I can contribute to the source tree, I'd love to help out. Our company is going to depend on this working.

13: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Chris Hardy on 09/13/00 11:11 PM

Got to http://www.majesticworks.com/patches/dirtypatch.patch for the patch. This should fix most of the problems (apply it using patch -p0 dirtypatch.patch at your /web directory). It's dirty because it's from my source tree, and not from the CVS version (which is what I ported the fixes too) Let me know if it works for you.

14: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Adam Farkas on 09/13/00 11:41 PM

Everyone -- please document where the UI of the Intranet falls short (i know, i know -- it's a huge list.)

The ACS Intranet UI is in the process of being overhauled for 4.0, and this is another chance for community members to get their $.02 in before the changes are set in concrete.

Personally, i've been cruising the various "free" intranet ASPs to get a basis for comparison. Looking at these sites is an eye-opening experience. There are some stunning examples of good UI (like huddle247.com's project management.) There are also some train-wrecks.

Any thoughts?

15: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Scott Mc Williams on 09/14/00 12:06 AM

Hey Adam,

I'd love to be part of the UI redesign. I think I can raelly help out in that arena. Right now on our instance of the Intranet I have a project open with a ticket tracker for the intranet itself. But, those are mostly technical problems, not UI items. I would assume that most of those are being fixed by the likes of Chris or Jade or someone else here.

Maybe we need a wishlist?

Scott

16: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 09/14/00 12:23 AM

Adam (and Ben), do I need to post problems (usability and otherwise) in the SDM for both OpenACS and ACS? I'm not really sure how valid they are because OpenACS is running a few version behind, so I'm hesitant to post these types of issues. Should UI issues and so on be addressed at OpenACS or ACS's SDM? It's too bad they weren't unified in one SDM, and then a field would say which it applied to.. (yes, I know the historical reasons why this didn't happen). Ben, BTW, the SDM is great!

17: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 09/14/00 12:25 AM

Just for posterity: apply Chris' patch if you're using OpenACS 3.2.2. Any later versions will probably require different patches :)

18: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Ben Adida on 09/14/00 12:28 AM

Also for posterity: while this patching is *very* much appreciated, and I should get a kick in the butt for not releasing OpenACS 3.2.4, let's do our best NOT to start recommending that people patch their installations left and right, as this stuff *will* be included in future versions. Use this patch if you *must* use it now, otherwise please wait for OpenACS 3.2.4, you'll find the code there.

19: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Jamie Ross on 02/20/01 06:49 AM

ok.. I am having major problems with any pages relating to employess coming up with errors. I managed to assign the CEO and one subordinate and org chart works but the rest of the employee admin pages error off. I am running ACS 3.2.4 against Postgresql7.1b ... any ideas before I start hacking code too much?

20: Response to Intranet permissions and groups (response to 1)

Posted by Chris Hardy on 02/20/01 06:22 PM

Yup, I fixed it, I just can't remember where.. Can you give me the snippit of your server.log so that I can find out what's going on?