ISIS Community SharePoint
Administrator’s Guide to User Management
Modified 10 February 2009
Contents
Note about this guide
Portal Overview
General information
What does an administrator do?
What is a user?
What is a site?
Administrator’s Tools
Finding your way home
Your A2Z home
Site Accesses: Giving users access to your site
Site access levels
Changing a user’s access level
What users see
User Self Registration
User Access Request
Appendix – Quick Guide...... 8
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Note about this guide
The most up-to-date version of this guide will always be available on the ISIS Support Home Page, located here: select“ISIS Website Support” (on the left), then select“ISIS Portal Resources” from the content menu.The Portal Admin Guide is listed under the Site Managers sub-heading and is named: “Portal Partner Admin Guide (.pdf file)”
Portal Overview
General information
A SharePoint site is a Web site that provides a central storage and collaboration space for documents, information, and ideas. A SharePoint site is a tool for collaboration, just like a telephone is a tool for communication, or a meeting is a tool for decision making. A SharePoint site helps groups of people (whether work teams or social groups) share information and work together. For example, a SharePoint site can help you:
* Coordinate projects, calendars, and schedules.
* Discuss ideas and review documents or proposals.
* Share information and keep in touch with other people.
SharePoint sites are dynamic and interactive -- members of the site can contribute their own ideas and content as well as comment on or contribute to other people's submissions.
What does an administrator do?
As an administrator, you are able to manage users (add, edit, and change permissions), create site content, modify your site’s appearance, choose who can see what parts of the site, and add pre-configured “web-part” components to your site. This guide focuses on user administration.
What is a member?
A member is a person who has a login to the site and who can make limited changes to sites content. Administrators can give users various levels of access to various parts of their site.
What is a visitor?
A visitor is a person who has a login to the site but can edit the content of the site. Visitors are able to view restricted content areas that a user cannot access.
What is a user?
A user is a person who does not have a login to the site and cannot edit the content of the site. Users can only view unrestricted content that isset by site administrators or members via the “anonymous access” settings in SharePoint.
What is a site?
Your site is the place where you post notices, share documents, update calendars, display photos, conduct surveys, and any other services you expect from a website.
All sites in the ISIS Community Portal are located underneath the following URL’s: and . An example site is: (The Amphibian Ark).
Administrator’s Tools
Finding your way to MyA2ZHome
When you arrive at you will see the public view of the portal homepage- at this point you are seeing the homepage from a “user” perspective (see explanation on page 1 for what rights a “user” has by default). If you look in the upper right corner of the homepage, you will see the link “myA2Z Home”. This link takes you to the site users and permissions management console. When you click on “my A2Z Home”, you may be asked to login. Do so using either the email address or user name that you registered when joining the ISIS Community Portal.
*Currently, if you have forgotten your password, you can select the “Forgot my Password” prompt on the log-on screen- this will offer you the challenge/response security questions you defined when registering your account. If you have forgotten your challenge/response information, you will need to contact to help reset your myA2ZHome portal password.
Your myA2ZHome Management Page
Once you arrive at your myA2ZHome, you will see the following links that help you accomplish your administrative tasks.
Site Accesses: Giving users access to your site
This is where you will grant or deny users access to your site, or when your know their ISIS Portal account name you may manually add them to your site via the Site Accesses menu.
Granting or denying a request
Any user on the ISIS Community Portal who would like to access to your site may request it. When they do, the request automatically is stored in your Site Accesses list. The request will also be sent to all the members of your site Owners Group- all of these members are considered administrators of your Portal site. There are two methods for granting or denying access to your Portal site.
1)Via the email alert that is sent to all Owners of the site.
There are two email confirmations that will be sent to the site Owners. One of these alerts is a confirmation of affiliation request that your employees will issue during their initial registration. This email will look like this:
From :To :
Subject: -ISIS Portal- New ISIS Portal Registration Request
Hello YourSite Admin,
This is to notify you that YOUR EMPLOYEE has attempted to register on the ISIS Community Portal as an affiliate of your association. This request must be approved or denied by a member of the YourSite Owners Group.
Requestor:
YOUR EMPLOYEE
To approve the request, please click here.
To deny the request, please click here.
If you need further assistance with your Portal account or have any other questions, please forward this email along with your questions to ISIS Support:
Thank you,
ISIS Portal Administrator
…once you have verified this user is a member of your organization and have approved their request, they will be able to request access to Portal Sites via the “myA2ZHome” link when they are logged in as themselves. Their “myA2ZHome” will look similar to your administrator page, but will be limited to requesting site access, and password change options. If this same user requests access to your Portal site, you may approve access for them via the email confirmation method. This is the second confirmation email that will be sent to the Owners group of your site. This email will look like this:
From :To : isisportalsiteowner @ yourorganization.org
Subject: -ISIS Portal- Request for Site Access to YOURSITE
Hello Admin,
This is to notify you that ISISPORTALMEMBER is requesting access to the below given sites
Site Name :- / YOURSITE
Notes :- / Note space available to requesting user, this is variable.
Owners Group / Members Group / Visitors Group / Deny Request
Note: Owners Group rights should only be granted to individuals who will edit YOURSITE Portal pages and will be able to grant or deny further YOURSITE access requests.
If you need further assistance with your Portal account or have any other questions, please forward this email along with your questions to ISIS Support:
Thank you,
ISIS Portal Administrator
2)The second method for approving or denying an access request is via the Site Accesses menu in the “myA2ZHome” administration menu.
Once you have logged into the ISIS Community Portal, click on “myA2ZHome” in the top right corner of the browser window. In the administration menu, select“Site Accesses” at the left side of the screen then click on the “Manage” link beside your site’s name:
This will take you to the “Site User Management” page. In the example below, you will see a list of user “Nikhil” who has requested access to the “AARK Visitors Group”. Notice Nihkil is only one user who has requested access at this time.
In the example below, we see that Nihkil in asking to join the AARK site as a visitor. Because we are the Owner of this site, we can also see that Nihkil previously gained access to the AARK site as a Member (look under the Existing Users in the Site table). In order to grant access to Nihkil as a visitor, we will need to first remove the higher level of access “Member” before accepting the new request for “Visitor” group access. If we do not remove the Member access first Nihkil’s account will function at the highest level of access granted.
Once you have verified the user does not have existing rights to your site, you can grant access by clicking on the “Accept” button or deny it by clicking on the “Reject” button in the right most column of the “Manage Requests” table. When you accept a user into your site, you are presented with a menu that asks what level of access they should be granted. As the Owner of the site, this is your responsibility to determine what group they below to.
**REMEMBER, Owners are able to administrate the site and add/remove users from the site, Members can make selected edits to your site and Visitors can read restricted content areas but cannot edit.
If you accept the request, the user will be added to the “Existing Users in the Site” list on this page. The next time the user logs in they will be able to visit your site and see any content that is restricted from view to a user who is not logged into the ISIS Portal. If you reject the request, the user disappears from this page and when they next log in, they will see that their request has been rejected.
Manually granting a user access to your site
If you want to grant access to your site to a user without requiring the user to request it, you can do that from the “Site User Management” page. Note – the person must have already registered, because you will search for them in the list of existing users. If they have not already done so, send them to ask them to choose the “Sign In” link at the top right of the browser, then have them register a new ISIS Community Portal account. It is vital that the user has a unique email address as the Portal requires that the user confirm their email address when they register.
To manually grant access to a user, on your Site User Management page, go to the section titled “Grant user access to this site” and click on the Find button:
This will pop up a window that lets you search for the user to whom you wish to grant access. You can search by user name, first name, last name, institution, or email address:
Once you have found the user, click on their user name. You will see that it now appears in the “Grant User (by user name)” field in the “Grant User access to this site” menu. When manually adding a user, you can choose the level of access you wish to grant by selecting the group to which you add them via the drop-down menu. The choices are Site Owners, Site Members, and Site Visitors. When you have selected the level of access, click the Grant button.
Site access levels
Site Owners Group- By default, Site Owners have full access to your site. That means they can add and delete pages and content, grant access to other users, etc., so this should be limited to those people whom you wish to act as administrators.
Site Members Group - Site Members can contribute content (e.g. upload photos, add documents, edit content, etc.) but cannot delete things they themselves have not created, nor can they manage users.
Site Visitors Group - Site Visitors can see content that is on your site but is restricted from view for the world wide web. Visitors can read content but cannot add nor edit content.
Changing a user’s access level
Remember that when a user requests access and you grant it, that user is automatically created in the Site Visitors group. There will probably be times when you would rather grant that user more access. To do this, look for the “Existing Users in the Site” list at the bottom of your Site User Management page. You will see the users who have access and the groups to which they belong. Note that a user may appear in more than one group; a user’s access is determined by the highest level group to which they belong.
In order to change a user’s access level, ensure you have reviewed all the “Existing users in the Site” and have removed any previous rights granted to the user if they are of a higher level of access. In the example above, we would look for User Name= “Nihkil” and Group Name= “AARK Owners Group”…if such an entry was present, we’d select “remove” to the left of that entry.
We wish to change Nihkil’s access to Visitor Group only, in the example above, we select “Change Security Group” in row listing the user as a member of the “AARK Members Group”. In the menu that opens, we will select “AARK Visitors Group” and select Ok.
What users see
It may be easier to understand your administrator functions if we take a minute to look at what users can do themselves.
User Self Registration
Users can register themselves to use the portal. They can do this by visiting This registration does not automatically grant them access to any sites, but it does allow them the rightto request access to sites. If the user states affiliation with your organization when they register, this requests then come to the site owner for approval of the affiliation.
User Access Request
Users who want access to a specific site can request this access. They can do this by visiting (they can get there by clicking my A2Z Home, then Site Accesses). These requests appear in the site owner’s queue, and remain in the user’s queue until they are either granted or denied access. If granted, the request disappears from the user’s queue and the user has access to the site. If a request is denied, it remains in the user’s queue and its status changes to Denied.
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Appendix – Quick Guide
To do this: / Go here:Grant access to a user who has requested it / My A2Z Home Site Accesses Manage
Check to see if any users have requested access / My A2Z Home Site Accesses Manage
Change a user’s access level / My A2Z Home Site Accesses Manage
Grant access to an existing user (who has not requested it) / My A2Z Home Site Accesses Manage
Deny access to a user / My A2Z Home Site Accesses Manage
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