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Administrator is a role in the system that permits full, uninhibited access to any asset and/or area of the system. A user assigned the administrator role has access to both the standard "Home" area where web page assets are managed and the "Administration" area where advanced system entities and publishing can be configured. Folder access rights do not apply to the administrator role; therefore, a user with administrator rights can view, edit, copy, delete, or move an asset without restriction. Additionally, administrators have the ability to break asset locks anywhere in the "Home" area.

More Insight Into Administrators

Because an administrator has access to everything within the system, the role should be assigned sparingly to only authorized users who require such access. In most cases, providing users with a manager role, which is more restricted and one level down from the administrator position will allow them to handle and perform most of the administrator operations. Managers have all of the same access and capabilities as administrators, except that access rights apply to them. Therefore, a user with manager access can be appropriately permitted and/or locked out from areas in both the "Home" and "Administration" sections of the CMS as the system administrator sees fit when assigning permissions.

Administrators and Workflows

Administrators may participate in all types of workflow steps, and can also bypass workflows or edit workflows in progress.

Bypassing a Workflow

Bypassing a workflow is only an option for administrator or manager level users.

To bypass a workflow, when editing an asset, simply ensure that the Workflow checkbox is unmarked under Advanced Options, and just above the Submit button. If the Workflow checkbox is not shown, click Advanced Options to reveal the various options available.

Deleting a Workflow

Once initiated, a workflow may only be deleted by the initiating user, an administrator or a manager. Deleting a workflow will cause all changes to be lost.

To delete an active workflow:

1. Select the desired workflow from My Workflows under Outstanding Items or the Workflows tab from your Dashboard.
2. Select the Delete tab, then click Submit to delete the workflow.
3. You will be returned to your Dashboard, and the message bar will verify that the delete action was successful.

PLEASE NOTE- Deleting a workflow will also cause all changes to be lost.

Assigning Permissions as an Administrator

Permissions determine which users or groups have access to a specific folder or asset. Administrators may grant read or write permissions to multiple individual users, or multiple groups.

To specify permissions for a folder or asset:

1. Select the folder or asset from the left asset tree
2. Click on the Advanced tab and then navigate to Access.
3. To specify one or more users, select each desired user from the Unassigned box, and click the green forward arrow to bring them into the Read box. Once users have been entered into Read box, you can then select from those users which ones you want to have Write access. Users left in the Unassigned box will have the default permissions level, as specified under All.
4. To specify one or more groups, select each desired group from the Unassigned box, and click the green forward arrow to bring them into the Read box. Once groups have been entered into Read box, you can then select from those groups which ones you want to have Write access. Groups left in the Unassigned box will have the default permissions level, as specified under All.
5. You may also restrict the folder or asset for all users by selecting the appropriate radio button under All. This will determine the default level of permissions for any users not specified above.
6. If you are defining permissions for a folder, select whether or not these permissions should be replicated for all child folders by checking or un-checking Apply to children.
7. Click Submit to save your changes.

ADDITIONAL NOTES- If a user or group is given read or write access to a child folder, read access is automatically granted to all parent folders and higher to facilitate navigation to the specified folder.

Configuration File Management for Administrators

Cascade Server 5 brings along with it the added convenience of managing configuration files directly from the application instead of managing files on the server.

To manage configuration files:

1. Navigate to Tools -> System -> Configuration -> Custom Authentication Configuration
2. This will bring you to the Configuration Management Screen
3. Select the configuration file you would like to update:
4. LDAP

-LDAP
-Product License
-Image Editor License and Configuration
-Publish Trigger Configuration
-Custom Authentication Configuration

5. Copy the contents of the new configuration file and click Submit.
6. The system will check the new file contents to ensure it is valid before overwriting any existing file.
   

The content supplied for each of these configurations will correspond exactly to the content of the license or configuration file used in previous versions of Cascade Server.

PLEASE NOTE - If Cascade Server 5 boots for the first time and a License file could not be detected, before you will be able to login, you must update the Product License configuration with the contents of your License.dat file.

How to Use the JIRA Trouble-Ticket System

Point your web browser to the address: http://support.hannonhill.com and log-in with your username and password.

Additional System Tools for Administrators

Optimize Database

Optimize Database is an option that appears only for administrators.

Running this function will clean the database of content versions, audit information, and system messages; it is not recommended to be used frequently.

Configure Logging

This tool is accessible through the Tools -> System -> Configure Logging menu. Upon choosing this item, you will be presented with a screen allowing you to enable to disable loggin in various parts of the system.

Log4j is the internal logging subsystem that Cascade uses to output information to the cascade.log file as well as other logs, like publish.log. These logs are useful from a diagnostic perspective and should not be considered part of the normal everyday administration of Cascade server.

When a user reports an issue, Hannon Hill will sometimes request that the logging on the problematic server be modified so that our staff can gather relevant information. Because it is undesirable (from a usability and performance standpoint) to enable logging in all parts of the application, this utility has been added to help adjust what gets logged and what does not.

These settings only need to be adjusted for diagnostic purposes and should not be considered a normal part of your interaction with Cascade Server. Note that any changes made will be reset the next time Cascade Server is restarted.

Rebuild Index

Occasionally, if a database is modified outside the context of the CMS, this will cause the lucene search indices to get out of sync with the database and generate error messages when searching in the CMS. Running the Rebuild Index system tool will rebuild the necessary search indices and correct this error.

Optional Database Optimizations

Optimize MySQL

The default install of MySQL is not optimized for InnoDB tables; all Cascade Server tables are of type InnoDB so that they will support transactions.

You can quickly check to see what level of caching the database is currently performing.

mysql> show status like '%qc%'; +-------------------------+----------+ | Variable_name | Value | +-------------------------+----------+ | Qcache_free_blocks | 1 | | Qcache_free_memory | 33545608 | | Qcache_hits | 0 | | Qcache_inserts | 0 | | Qcache_lowmem_prunes | 0 | | Qcache_not_cached | 353983 | | Qcache_queries_in_cache | 0 | | Qcache_total_blocks | 1 | +-------------------------+----------+ 8 rows in set (0.00 sec) mysql>

After tweaking and optimizing your configuration parameters, you should see something more like this:

mysql> show status like '%qc%'; +-------------------------+----------+ · | Variable_name | Value | +-------------------------+----------+ · | Qcache_free_blocks | 1 | · | Qcache_free_memory | 14345816 | · | Qcache_hits | 6497 | · | Qcache_inserts | 7546 | · | Qcache_lowmem_prunes | 0 | · | Qcache_not_cached | 1142 | · | Qcache_queries_in_cache | 7545 | · | Qcache_total_blocks | 15149 | +-------------------------+----------+ 8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

You can see here that the query cache itself is now being used. We recommend incorporating the following variables into your [mysqld] settings:

[mysqld] #Don't cache results that are bigger than& this. query_cache_limit=1M #minimal size of unit in which space for results is allocated (last unit will be trimed after writing all result data) #Note that this variable is for MySQL 4.1 or later only query_cache_min_res_unit=1024 #The memory allocated to store results from old queries. query_cache_size=32M #Query cache type to use. query_cache_type=1 #The size of the buffer used for index blocks. Increase this to get better index handling (for all reads and multiple writes) to as much as you can afford; 64M on a 256M machine that mainly runs MySQL is quite common. key_buffer_size=32M #Each thread that needs to do a sort allocates a buffer of this size. sort_buffer_size=2M #The bigger you set this the less disk I/O is needed to access data in tables. On a dedicated database server you may set this parameter up to 80% of the machine physical memory size. Do not set it too large, though, because competition of the physical memory may cause paging in the operating system. innodb_buffer_pool_size=128M #Size of a memory pool InnoDB uses to store data dictionary information and other internal data structures. A sensible value for this might be 2M, but the more tables you have in your application the more you will need to allocate here. If InnoDB runs out of memory in this pool, it will start to allocate memory from the operating system, and write warning messages to the MySQL error log. innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=8M

Once you've made the changes, please restart your MySQL server and the CMS server.

Speed Optimizations

There are several items that can be done to improve performance of Cascade Server on Windows.

1. Increase the amount of memory allocated to the program. The default is 512 MB. Increase this to the maximum amount allowed by your system. Look for the -Xmx value in either the run.bat or the wrapper.conf file located in the bin folder.
2. Increase the connection pooling values for the database. Open your ***-ds.xml file for your respective database and increase the cache size.
3. If you are running Cascade Server as a Windows Service, increase the service priority from NORMAL to HIGH. This can be done by adding the following value in your wrapper.conf and uninstalling and reinstalling the Windows Service:
   wrapper.ntservice.process_priority=HIGH

Administrator References

• LDAP/Active Directory
• Available Plug-ins
• Access Rights

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