Work with main policies

Use the Resource Policies portlet to perform tasks on main policies: editing policy settings, refining a policy by creating a child policy, importing and exporting policy definitions, assigning user access to policies, and setting display preferences.

A policy is a collection of settings that influences the behavior of a portal resource and the experience that users will have when working with the resource. Policies are grouped according to the types of resources that apply the policies.

For example, personal information applications can be managed by a Mail policy, a Calendar policy, and an Address Book policy. For each policy type, the main policy specifies the default settings for the resource as determined by the rule in force for the policy. You can refine the main policies that are provided for portal resources by creating child policies that inherit or override the policy settings of the parent policy. Thus, a main policy is the root of the policy hierarchy for a particular resource. As the top-level policy, a main policy has no parent policies, but it can have one or more levels of child policies. Child policies provide successive layers of specialization for managing the behavior of the resource with respect to user tasks.

The collection of policy settings for a particular portal resource is defined in an XML file. The policy definition contains one or more rules that describe the actions that will occur on a target user or object when specific conditions exist. The events or conditions that must be evaluated for the resource and the actions performed on the resource are expressed in the rules and presented in the policy settings. You can import and export the XML files that contain policy definitions and use the XML configuration interface utility to customize policy definitions.

• Edit policy settings

  View and edit the settings for the main policy, the top-level policy for the resource.

• Refining policies

  Create one or more child policies to refine a main policy.

• Import a policy definition

  Import an XML file that contains the definition of a main policy.

• Export a policy definition

  Export the policy definition for the main policy by saving the definition to another XML file.

• Assigning access to policies

  Assign user access to work with a policy by assigning and editing user roles.

• Set display preferences

  Edit the Resource Policies portlet to set the display preferences for viewing policies.

Parent topic:

Work with policies

Next topic:

Work with child policies

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