In the previous chapter, we discussed in detail the pages of the Portal-Group-Page-Content pattern. In this chapter, we're going to open the book group and take a deeper look into it. The portal provides a powerful yet highly configurable, full-security model to control resources, permissions, roles, users, organizations, locations, sites, and user groups. This full security model incorporates fine-grained permissions and role-based access control to give administrators full control over access and privileges to portlets, layouts, groups, and content within the portal. With role-based access control, users can assign permissions to other users, sites, organizations, and user groups via roles. Moreover, users can control permissions scoped up to the portal or down to the page or the content.

This chapter begins with enterprises, departments, and locations, the hierarchy, and the role-based access control model. Then, it proceeds to how to bring in users, organizations...