The enterprise Palm Tree Publications has its global headquarters in the U.S. with several departments (such as editorial, engineering, marketing, website, and so on). Each department has staff in the United States, Germany, and India. As shown in following figure, the enterprise, departments, and locations form a hierarchy. In this chapter, we will build this hierarchy with a model called role-based access control (RBAC).

Figure 3.1: The Palm Tree enterprise structure

Before starting, let's assume that we have a set of users in the enterprise Palm Tree Publications. We will plan to bring the following users into the portal; briefly, a user is an individual who performs tasks using the portal: