Dear all,

We are trying to set up a larger website where we would guide our visitors to multiple DNN portals, depending on who they are and what they want to do.

So here is my question. How can I set up DMX Exchange to share the same document tree across multiple DNN portals. How would I need to set up security for that, and where to store the documents?

Thanks for any ideas or thoughts.

Claude
www.education.lu

Hi Claude,

You can't unfortunately. DMX's content is deeply wired to the portal ID. It is impossible to share content across portals.

Peter

Hi Claude,

I have a thought you may want to consider. On one of the first portal setups I created for a customer, it started out as one portal for one department, then grew into multiple portals for multiple departments. It just happened and was not planned that way. I had no idea up front that multiple departments would want to have "their own" portal.

While the portals were for different "audiences", many times the same documents and other content needed be on more than one portal. It was very time consuming and confusing for the users to maintain.

It eventually was redesigned into a single portal, using security roles, to show only the correct pages and content to the target audience. Since you mentioned security, I'm guessing you intend to have users register to access certain content, in which case the single portal concept could work well for you.

The main issue is upon registration is to determine what security role(s) they need to be in. This can be a manual process or potentially automated, if you use a third party registration module.

Anyway, food for thought.

Rob Ralston
SilverBullet Technologies LLC

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your thoughts. It's always good to have different opinions.

Just to tell what we are about to do.
Today: we are running a national education portal with Oracle Aqualogic, with 80000 users within >200 portals (called communities). Basically students, teachers in different schools, accessing pedagogical content (>40000 documents) and applications. Users are categorized and roles synced.
Challenge: Get this under the DNN hood. Role syncing is done. Now we need to migrate content and portals.

I fear for some time now that I have to get everything under a few portals. The longer it takes, the lesser I fear ;-)

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

Claude

On a more "philosophical" level: I'm somewhat puzzled by the movements of DNN over the past years in this respect. DNN started out with this portal virtualization that allowed you to keep everything absolutely separate. This was "best practice" and every bit of the framework was designed to avoid data "leak". Now they've added "portal groups" and "single signon". Meaning: we intend "portals" to be used to just group bunches of pages together. For me it doesn't really make sense. I can see why some use cases would like multiple portals. But I don't like the way it has now been implemented and where we are now encouraged to support sharing of content. Anyway, like I said, it is pretty deeply wired into DMX and taking this out is going to be a non-trivial intervention.

Peter