Delegated administrative policy

An administrator is a user who is authorized to modify the access control configuration by changing role assignments and creating or deleting role blocks. When you install portal or create new VP, you set an administrator user, who becomes the domain administrator and can admister all the resources in that domain.

WebSphere Portal also supports delegated administration, what that means is Portal Admin can give certain access rights to other user and that user can pass some of his user rights to other administrator. Take a look at this diagram. The wpsadmin is portal administrator, so he can assign say Editor or Privleged User role to Sunil for particular page in Asia Marketing team. He can also delegate administrative rights for Marketing team to Mark and then mark would be able to assign rights to Sunil for particular page or he can pass the Admin rights for pages under Asia Marketing to James and James would be able to assign the appropriate user Rights to Sunil.



WebSphere Portal has delegated administration policy that determines how users are permitted to delegate their privileges to other users or groups. The general policy for creating or deleting role assignment is as follows. A user Mark/marketingadmin can assign a Editor role to Sunil only in one of the following cases are met

  1. Mark has the Administrator@Portal or Security Administrator@Portal role. That means he is the super admin for portal.

  2. Since Mark is not super admin, he can assign Editor Role to sunil on one of the Marketing Portal pages only if all of the following conditions are met

    • Mark has the Security Administrator@Markeing Page or Administrator@Marketing Page role

    • Mark has atleast Editor@Marketing Page role.

    • Mark has the Delegator@Sunil, Security Administrator@Sunil or Administrator@Sunil role. Its better to create asiamarketingusers/marketinguser group and assign admin rights to Mark on that group




So if Mark wants to assign Editor role to Sunil on Asia Marketing Page then he must have Delegator@Sunil + Security_Administrator@Asia Marketing Page + Editor@Asia Marketing Page.