Organizations

An organizational entity is a type of member in WebSphere Commerce. An organizational entity is further classified into one of three types: an organization, an organization unit, or an authorization domain. You would typically create organizations directly under the Root Organization, for example, "o=ibm,o=root organization". Organization units are usually used to represent lower level organizational entities under a top-level organization, for example, "ou=software division,o=ibm,o=root organization". Organizations and Organization units own most of the assets in WebSphere Commerce, for example other organizational entities, users, stores, and contracts. Authorization domains on the other hand can only own other authorization domains, and other non-member assets. The classification of authorization domain is used when the organizational entity should only exist in the WebSphere Commerce database, and not be replicated to the LDAP server. (The authorization domain classification is only relevant when WebSphere Commerce is configured to store member attributes in an LDAP server.) Note that organizational entities are often referred to as organizations for simplicity.

About this task

For site administrators, one of your first tasks after installing and configuring WebSphere Commerce is setting up and managing access to your e-commerce site. This involves creating organizations that will participate at your site, as well as defining the users that will be members of those organizations. After an instance is created, there are sample business models that administrators can publish that will set up the organization structure.

In some cases, the organizations joining your site may be buyer organizations, or else, you may have customers registering at your site who are engaged in a business-to-consumer relationship with your business. Regardless if you are administering a business-to-business or business-to-consumer site, defining the organizational structure of site is an important step in managing the types of access that members have to your system.

Related concepts

Users

Authorization

Related tasks

Define a seller organization

Define buyer organizations

Create an organization

Change organizations

Change a partner group for a partner site (Channel Manager) - - -