Question

I need to model a very complex structure in Liferay, but don’t see how it can be done. I currently have a hierarchical tree of organizations with users and I need to be able to group them in a special way. The concept of a community fits part of this perfectly, but the problem is that I need to have a sublevel in such a community that corresponds to a set of users from a certain organization.

This can roughly be described as a delegation of people from an organization to a community. To me this sounds as a sub-community, but that is something that doesn’t seem to be supported by Liferay.

In whatever way this can be modeled the extra requirements are that off course the roles/permissions system keeps working and that it is possible to assign specific roles to people inside of a delegation, but not on the higher organization level. Additionally another nice feature would be if some sort of ad-hoc grouping of delegations could be done so that certain delegations in a community can (temporarily) share stuff the other delegations can’t see.

Answer 1

Depending on the version of Liferay you are using, you can create a “Team” which is essentially a Community Role that is scoped down to that community.

To create a team,

1. Goto Control Panel > Communities.
2. Click on “Action” next to a community.
3. Click on “Manage Teams”.

Here you can create a team and assign users to it.

Now when you pull up a permissions panel inside that community you’ll see that the team is available. For example, you can create a category in the message boards and remove all permission for regular community members except for those in a particular team.