INOVA Framework: - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 347

• Administrators . They have several tasks:
administering users, checking the links in
the web portal are valid, managing the da-
tabase, etcetera.

Privileges, as we explained in the previous
section, are inherited. A role's privileges consist
of those directly applied, and those assigned to
any of its ancestors.
The system supports eight levels of access:

The users in a higher level inherit the privi-
leges of the user in a lower level. For instance, a
registered user, as well as their own privileges,
will inherit the privileges of the anonymous users.
The reason the two branches are divided, is
that administrator users could be not members
of the INOVA staff, and vice versa.
One important feature is that a user can be of
more than one type of role. For instance, a user
could be a validator and an INOVA member. This
is very useful in some cases, where a user can be,
for instance, a corporative web validator, and a
news editor.
The list of roles is open, allowing the creation
of new roles in the future if we consider it neces-
sary, with specific permissions for these new roles.
By the moment, a user can be created only if
an administrator does so, assigning it to a group.
In the future, any user could register as a “regis-
tered user” using a registering form that will be
accessible in the main page of the web portal.

• No access.

• Overview: The user can read content, al-

though also a “weak” type of read. It allows,
for instance, to see a summary of published
content, but not the whole content.

• Read. The user can read content.

• Comment: Users can submit content, such

as a document, or a comment.

• Moderate: The user can manage someone

else's content.

• Edit: The user can change existing content

but not add or delete.

• Add: The user can add or edit content.

• Delete. The user can delete content.

• Admin: The user has unrestricted access.

The levels are cumulative. That means that
a user having a given access also has the access
right of levels below it. For example, “edit” access
also implies “read” access.

Privileges Management System Information Management System

The privileges are responsible for the security of
the web portal. The idea we follow is that anything
that is not explicitly permitted is denied. This
means that the access to the system or to part of
the system is only available where is explicitly
granted. Since is a important part of the system,
we wanted to include it in this document.
The privileges are assigned to the roles. A role
given a privilege has the access that the privilege
represents. Privileges can be defined very nar-
rowly. Thus, a privilege could be limited only
to a type of content, to a specific module, or to
a component within a module. They also can be
assigned to a certain part of the web portal.

The system has several types of information
management systems to treat with different type
of data. In the following subsections we explain
what we consider some of the more relevant
systems. By the combination of these systems
and other applications we are going to develop
in the future, we intend to create a web portal of
reference in the fields of innovation, optimization,
and valorization of private companies.

News Management System
This system allows administrators with enough
privileges to add, to edit or to modify existing
news. If these administrators have validation
privileges, then they can change the status of the