How to find a Organization's owner by api
If a user want to join a Organization, he should apply first, then the owner will got a message and determine if the user can join. How to solve this problem ?
You'll get the "self service" - e.g. applying for membership - with regular Sites. make them protected and you'll get exactly what you're looking for.
Organizations, by design, don't have this capability. Thinking of it, Sites were meant to be supporting voluntary memberships, while Organizations (you can think of it by the name) "make you a member of them", not vice versa.
So if you want to have this self service functionality for Organizations, you'll have to (completely) implement this yourself.
Related
I am creating an application that uses Azure AD user groups to grant permissions to specific resources. For example, a particular set of documents can only be accessed by users in specific groups. The application receives the group ids as claims on the JWT and ensures that only documents assigned to groups in the claims are visible.
Now, the question is how to manage groups correctly in Azure AD. When users are assigned to a group become a member of that group and any groups that group is nested in. This seems to imply that my group nesting should be the reverse of the tree structure I would like. Something like this:
Admin --> member of --> Group with most access --> member of --> group with less access --> member of --> group with least access.
To me this seems backwards but it provides the correct access rights to users added to each group.
Am I way off base here or is this a reasonable way to manage access rights with AD groups?
#JoyWang already covered some good points in answer above. Here are some additional considerations. Disclaimer: Due to nature of question, my answer here is mostly opinion and learning from some cases. Idea is to share how I have seen groups getting used along with some related info.
Are the groups specific to your application or more general purpose? Group membership and nested groups are usually used to organize users & groups logically/intuitively rather than design permissions for specific application
Many times Azure AD Groups are used by more than one application and may have a lifetime longer than any one specific application you're developing.
The way you are thinking about nesting groups based on which one has more access v/s less access you're probably concerned about only one particular application that you're developing and thinking about a group's access to this application. This approach will work out if the groups you plan to create are also very application specific and will NOT be used for any other purpose.
Example1: Your application is a blogging app and groups you create in Azure AD are Viewer, Contributor and Admin. (Admin > Contributor > Viewer)
Example2: You have an enterprise using Azure AD and groups organize users logically, say deparatment wise Marketing, Human Resources, Engineering etc.
So, the way you describe nested groups based on lower access permissions to higher, it will technically work out for a simpler scenario like in Example1 but not for Example2 where groups are more general purpose.
Many times general purpose groups already exist and you're expected to reuse them rather than create new ones for your application which require new assignments/membership all over again, but this may or may not be applicable in your specific case.
Also, there can be multiple people managing these groups and their membership so any design/organization pattern you come up with should give importance to intuitiveness even if you have to sacrifice minor application specific efficiency sometimes.
In my opinion, you can look at both flat or nested groups.. if it makes sense from an organization of users and groups standpoint, not just access permissions. Another fictious example: Marketing Group can have a member group like Marketing Content Approvers because it's a subset of Marketing people.
Do consider Application Roles.
They are specific to an application, tied to it's manifest and can be available to you as part of claims in token.
There can be situations like individual resource based access where you want to give permissions to a specific resource where Application Roles may or may not make sense and you still need to rely on groups or users directly. In any case, it's another helpful option available to you.
Managing Groups (as you've asked about this in comments)
Take a look at Self Service Group Management Scenarios (Delegated v/s Self-service) and also Dynamic Groups for dynamic membership rules based on attributes (requires Premium license though).
In AAD, the permissions of a member in the groups depend on the biggest permission of the group which he is a member of. For example, group A can access a resource and group B can't access it, the man is both in group A and B, then he will be able to access the resource.
To me this seems backwards but it provides the correct access rights to users added to each group.
Let we call the three groups as A,B,C, the permission of them is A > B >C. Obviously, if you add A to B, the permissions of A and B both have not been affected. But if you add B to A, the members in A or B will both have the biggest permission, it is no what you want. The same with B and C. This is why it provides the correct access rights to users added to each group as you said.
So in my personal opinion, seems no need to use nested groups, just use three groups with different permissions, it's enough.
We are implementing a Liferay 6. 2 solution, everything was set but then we had a problem. Thing is, we are importing all the users from AD using LDAP with their group information. So, in liferay, we will have users and users' group. We planned to follow organization->sub-organization structure but the customer does not want to assign all the users(no option to assign user groups to organization which i know why and it totally make sense ) to the organization manually which, kind of, makes sense. So, then we had to change our design, now what we are doing is actually creating a department-wise site then assigning user groups to the site and then linking site to organization. So two questions.
Does it make any sense to have organization? if so then what advantages will I have in this particular case.
Do you see any drawbacks in our approach or should we follow a better approach which we are not aware of.
I have scenario as, I have say 5 branches for example Branch A, Branch B, Branch C etc. All branches have different set of users and different set of data(in liferay portlets). My requirement is like, Whenever user from Branch A logs in he should not able to logged in to other branch. In short he should not have any permission to view, login to Branch B (other than his own branch).
All 5 branches has two sub-sites.
Eg. Branch A has sub sites Site A1 and Site A2. separate users are associated to the site.
My Question is what should I use to develop such system.
As of now I had created one Organisation and created Location Sub organisation.
How can I restrict user to log in himself into his own organisation and not anyone else.
How can I restrict user to view the contents on his own site and not other site.
Do I need to create User Groups.
Any Pointers would be helpful. Thanks in advance.
First of all: You don't need Locations. They're just like Organizations, but can't have any more suborganizations. This is a limitation that you don't need to impose on your branche offices. You can, but don't need to.
You always log in to your account, not into an organization. When there's content in an organization's site that must not be seen by non-members of that organization, just make the pages private - this restricts them to be seen only by members of the organization.
Membership of organizations is centralized anyways - thus nobody can become member of another organization without an administrator making the connection.
If you need user groups depends on what your overall structure is. If you interface with LDAP, I like to use user groups as the importing target for LDAP groups. If you don't, it still might make sense to group users into User Groups - just to keep an overview over the different memberships and permissions that you give. It's a lot easier if you restrict yourself to not grant any roles and permissions to individual users, only to User Groups - at least once you have a certain number of users.
I would like to find out all of the user which are associated in some roles. I have seen the UserLocalService that provides the method to find the users in a particular role. But I want a method to which I can pass an array of roleIds and it shall return me the list of users in those roles.
One way is to write custom SQL, but I would like to get it done by using the API only.
Is that possible with Liferay API??
Call the API multiple times? Create a new service that does this for you so that you only have a single call to (your) API?
I know, this is probably not the answer that you expected. Note that roles in Liferay can be scoped globally (to the whole portal, called 'regular') or to an individual site or organization. Thus just giving a roleId would limit you to the global roles (as the others would require the site's or organization's groupId).
Stepping back and looking at what you want to achieve, my first guess is that you have some semantics in being associated with a specific role - kind of like... a usergroup? A role is designed to give permissions to users, while a usergroup is designed to group users. UserLocalService also has getUserGroupUsers - this also only takes a single usergroup id, but at least it's a single (global) scope by definition and not ambiguous like roles.
If a company often requires users to be created in a partner's active directory, and vice versa, does it make sense to set up a federated / trusted relationship between the AD instances? If so, what should be considered? Does the ACL for users in the partner AD still work the same way? What security risks does this expose?
Thanks!
KA
Update:
I've learned that there's a better way to do this by having the application itself check user stores. The best way to do this is by moving the application into a domain trusted by both user stores. I've provided more detail in my answer below.
I've been researching this a bit more, and I've found a good solution. Since both companies both need to use the same system, the system itself just needs to verify if a user exists in either of the user stores(authentication), and then to the authorization at the system level.
The idea behind giving both companies access is solid - If we are working together and didn't have a way to do this, we'd need to re-create all the users from the company without access in the connected user store. Obviously, this would be a total mess and a maintenance nightmare.
I found out that in my case, even though both ADs are on the same WAN, it's necessary to have a formal federation or trust. Thankfully, we already have a domain that's trusted between both companies, so I just have to move the applications used by the partners into this domain. After that, it's simply a matter of fully-qualifying the DNS suffix to indicate the AD being used. Application-specific ACLs then reference the desired user store.
Yeah, it makes sense if you want both to be able to authenticate people across mulitple domains. You have to put the server that has the application you're targeting in a domain trusted by every AD instance you want to use for authentication.