setting up resource space for multiple clients
Christian H
just wanted to share with you the way I have implemented setting up
resourceSpace for use with different clients so that they can only see
their own images and not each others, as I havn't seen anything
explicit anywhere yet.
We are a graphic design firm, and our clients are constantly
requesting images which is a hassle - so our idea with resourceSpace
is to use it as a more efficient way for us to provide this as a
service to them, and also we plan to use it to manage our own stock
photography collection.
Here are the steps i have used to set up a method of restricting
images to different clients
1. In the 'Resource Types / Fields' i created a new global asset
called 'client' so this can be attached to each resource. I made it a
drop down list, and filled the options field with values, starting
with a comma so that no value is automaticaly selected, eg:
'company1,company2,company3'. make sure to fill in the 'short field'
field as you will reference it in step 2. You will need to update any
resources that belong to your client using this new field.
2. For each client we have, i created a new user group eg 'Client User
- Company1' based on the general user settings. Then enter in the
'search filter' field your short field name from step 1 and your
company name from the options list eg 'client=company1'. Note: now
that you have created a custom 'client' field for each resource, you
must tailor the permissions so this field is not accessible to them -
so change the permissions where you may have 'f*' to 'f1,f2,f3' etc
3. Lastly, for each client user account, i created a new user and
attach them to the relevant user group created in step 2. This way you
can have more than one user per company.
And bingo! that's it. Now when your client logs and does an empty
search, instead of seeing all resources in the system, they will only
see ones that are tagged as belonging to them.
Oh yes....this assumes you have actually gone back to some of your
resources and updated the new 'client' field with the appropriate
values.
I'd be really interested to hear anyones feedback on this method of
setting up private resources for different clients within
ResourceSpace, and if there's any better or even different way of
doing it - in the interests of weighing up the pros and cons.
Thanks!
Mr C
note to authors of RS: thanks - this contribution to the open source
movement RRRRROX!!
Christian H
'resource creation' permission of each client user group to 'd',
rather than 'c' so that you can assign the resource to the client,
rather than them doing it themselves. You should also add the
restrictive group permissions E and U so they can only email users
within their group, and assign users within their group
Dan Huby
That's great, thanks for posting. It would be good to have this info
on the wiki as I think it's very useful, if you fancy adding a page
for it (perhaps under System Administrator's Guide). I think the
component parts are there on the wiki but not a complete guide to
setting it all up.
The other way of doing this is to use the standard permissions (i.e.
the 'custom' access level when editing resources) to allocate
resources manually to groups, which is going to be potentially more
time consuming. Also from an administrator's point of view being able
to search on that 'client' field, to return resources that are
available to specific customers, is very useful and is something you
can't do when using standard resource permissions. I can see that
using metadata/filters is certainly easier to manage.
Some extra things you can do with groups that might be useful for
your multiple client setup:
- You can use the 'parent' field on the groups to allow one group
to manage the users in another. You'd have two groups per client, one
admin and one general, and the admin users can manage the general
users. So you could let your client manage their own logins. The
admin group needs the 'U' permission.
- The 'fixed theme' field allows you to set CSS separately for each
user group. This means you could replace the logo with your client's
logo just for users in that group. You need to copy the 'css/Col-
greyblu.css' file to 'css/Col-mytheme.css' assuming 'mytheme' is the
value you set for the fixed theme. You can then tweak the copied CSS
file to specify a path to a custom logo instead of the standard logo
(replace '../gfx/greyblu/titles/title.gif' with a path to the custom
logo)
Hope this is useful.
Dan
guy
Do you append automatically the tag "client=company1" when somebody
from the "company1" usergroup uploads a new resource? (and how?)
If not, users can't display their own contributions.
Dan Huby
Instead of making the client field a dropdown, you could make it a
check box list, then you can share the same resource among multiple
clients by ticking more than one box.
On 13 Mar 2008, at 10:45, Christian H wrote:
Tom Gleason
For certain purposes, this grouping strategy is very useful. The "fixed theme" is a really nice feature, and it also properly and automatically does away with the theme "chips" at the bottom, which are cool but not always appropriate ( BTW...I like the new black theme!). I implemented a fixed theme today to brand the site for my client. It is definitely cool to see the site change depending on the login.
I prefer separate installations in the case of separate clients, though. It seems safer.
Christian H
On Mar 14, 2:44 am, guy <guyto...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you append automatically the tag "client=company1" when somebody
> from the "company1" usergroup uploads a new resource? (and how?)
to do this although I havn't done anything like that yet.
> If not, users can't display their own contributions.
is ok with the way I work, it just means that an admin has to assign
the client to each resource. The way I am doing that at the moment is
to look at recent uploads, and add all the resources from a particular
client to a temporary or empty collection. Then do an 'edit all' so
you can assign the client to all pics in one go. I empty out or delete
the collection and start again for the next client.
Christian H
On Mar 14, 3:06 am, Dan Huby <danh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Instead of making the client field a dropdown, you could make it a
> check box list, then you can share the same resource among multiple
> clients by ticking more than one box.
give clients access to all my stock photos, they then think they own
it and can use it anywhere, anytime and on their own projects, which
is not the case!
I prefer to give them a separate user login for our own stock - that
way they know whats theirs and whats ours.
tom
be changed so dramatically per usergroup, is making the homepage
images configurable in a similar way. Right now, if I'm not mistaken,
this must be the same for all users.
Dan Huby
That's right. The only way round this at the moment is to disable the
home page (using $use_theme_as_home in config.php), which isn't
ideal, although using the theme page as the home might work well in
certain circumstances.
What I'd like to do is to make the slideshow use actual resources
automatically, perhaps by linking it to a collection, and the
collection could be configurable per usergroup. I think this might be
quite time consuming though. For a start none of the images would be
the correct size, so some sort of crop or rescale would be necessary.
andyb
client and then adding users to the group. Then assigning collections
to the groups. This way I can be in multiple groups. This can also
work for brands / companies too.
andy