Adding Portal tabs for users??

[Arsenal]

Hi,

When a new user is added in, and needs access to a portal tab, the adminsitrators have to go in and delete the user's default portal tab before the user can see the new portal tab

Or the user can manually add in the portal tab

Is there a way the administrators can add the user and the user can see the portal tab without the step of the administrator deleting the manual portals? 15,000 users so...

I'm thinking SDK but is there another solution?

Thanks!

[Ty Clabbers]

try knowledgebase item 1031913.3. There is a SDK sample that will do what you need. Also don't forget to set the "hideInaccessibleTabs" variable in the system.xml to true so those endusers who don't have access to the portal tab won't see it (if the value is false they will see a small yellow triangle with an error message).

[Arsenal]

Thanks!

We'll have to look into it.

[rockytopmark]

Check out MetaManager at bspsoftware.com, it has a Portal "Blaster" that will probably do what you need, as well as a lot of other great things.

http://bspsoftware.com/products/metamanager.php

[larsonr]

If I remember correctly, the knowledge base document listed in above will only apply to new user accounts.  This may prove problematic for old accounts that may have migrated roles across the organization.  There are a few scripts available using the SDK if you have the license that you could write extracts yourself to handle the portal tab assignment dynamically.  Its just a thought and it is a solution I know that works.

[Ty Clabbers]

The script that comes with the knowledge base document will add the new tab to all existing profiles in a certain role. It will also create the profiles for those users who haven't yet logged in. That last part is easy to remove by the way. For the new profiles you should alter the default profile.

[akustw01]

I know this is kind of old; however, I would like to share how we hide and show are portal tabs to users.

In the <install_directory>/templates/ps/portal/system.xml

we edited the following: (restart needs to be performed when editing this file)

<!-- Show/hide inaccessible portal tabs -->
        <param name="hideInaccessibleTabs">true</param>

By default this is set to False, by setting this to true you will hide the portal tabs that users do not have access to view.

We then via the default profile give everyone access to every portal tab by default. This way we do not have to add or remove portal tabs via the profile of the user.

We then secured the portal tabs based on our groups and what individuals need to see.  The reset of the portal tabs will not be shown because we removed portal tabs that are not accessible via the above setting. 

We we need to add a brand new portal tab in the mix, we have to use one of the previous mentioned solutions to add new tabs for existing users.

Hope this helps and makes life a little easier for others in the future.

[larsonr]

If you're not wanting to purchase a packaged software solution, your best way is via the SDK.  You can actually take several of the scripts available and piece them together to form a solution that will create the portal tabs for users based off of template users.

We typically have 7 main user groups, each group with their own portal tabs.  Within that, I have a template user for each group.  At night, to keep conformity, I check to make sure they haven't deleted any portal tabs necessary to the role and add the missing/new portal tabs in.  This is fairly simple if you can locate the samples that A) Checks what portal tabs a user has, and B)the script that adds single portal tabs.  The SDK though does cost on a separate license than your Cognos BI Server licenses.

If I can track down the knowledge base documents I will send an update to the post.  The previous posts with the hide inaccessible option in the system.xml file would be a safety net incase permissions were not set correctly on the tab.