Add and Manage Sitefinity Users: Self-Service in the Cloud

Content editors, approvers and developers acting as one in tight workflows. Admins and DevOps pulling strings behind the scenes. If you want your project to make music, you need the right roles having the right level of access to the right environments.

And you want to independently manage all of it.

Welcome back to our "What’s New in Sitefinity Cloud" series. Self-service is still the theme but this time around, we’re looking at user management in Sitefinity and setting up the proper permissions for the various groups and roles.

Cloud Management Portal and Sitefinity Users

Long story short, Sitefinity Cloud engineering has extended the standard Azure DevOps capabilities to let you manage users in a single, comfortable hub—and that’s both Cloud Management Portal users and Sitefinity users.

You can invite people to your Sitefinity project and give them granular permissions, in tight Active Directory integration.

Self-service in the Cloud

One of the key things about platforms-as-a-service (PaaS), such as Sitefinity Cloud, is the balance between the responsibilities of the customer vs. the responsibilities of the vendor. You have full control over your applications, source code, data and configurations—while we take care of the infrastructure and networking.

That’s the beauty of the cloud, but to make sure everything works as promised, it’s important to draw a line between who does what. To guarantee the security, high performance and availability of your application, as well as honor our 99.9% SLA, we need tight control over the project administration and critical parts of the infrastructure.

So, until now, user management was within our area of responsibility, but the new user management in Sitefinity Cloud gives you back control over a critical aspect of Sitefinity administration and offers a single, centralized place to add and manage the users and roles that are key to your operation.

One of the first things you’ll notice about the new users hub is that it blends seamlessly with the management portal UI. You’ll feel right at home—the design language and user experience are familiar and consistent.

In the neat grid showing the permissions for portal users and roles for specific Sitefinity environments, you can search, sort, edit or add new users with a single click of the convenient Invite button. The extended menu with options to edit permissions and roles, resend invitation or remove users is quite handy and perfectly coherent with the portal UX.

Once you get to actually adding users, you’ll appreciate the simplified flow with clearly defined options for Cloud Management Portal access, as well as roles and permissions across Sitefinity environments.

You can choose to give your Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal users the following permissions:

• Manage boards: work with Kanban boards
• Access repos: contribute to code repositories and trigger pipelines
• Promote to production: approve deployment to the production environment
• Manage users: add or remove users, and modify their level of access

As far as Sitefinity user access goes, you can add the person you’re inviting to one or more of your user groups and do so for each of your environments. Of course, a user can be a member of multiple groups as well as have a different set of privileges on different environments. All in all, the new Cloud User Management gives you an impressive level of granularity and full control over who does what and where.

As user management is tightly integrated with Azure AD, this is a very convenient single sign-on solution for enterprise clients with complex structures and various users and roles. They can centrally manage access from a single place for all sorts of roles: admin, DevOps, development, editorial. It’s a very efficient turnkey solution for existing customers too, who are considering migrating to the cloud.

For those who really want to know what’s under the hood, the roles per environment you see in the drop-down are the Azure Active Directory user groups that we create when setting up each project and map to the default Sitefinity user groups.

The only part of the process that’s not automated is creating custom Sitefinity user groups. Even though it’s an edge case, we’re looking at ways to extend the solution to cover this scenario as well, by adding a process to automatically handle the user group mapping.

The typical use cases and the default functionality are perfectly covered, though. Our latest tool lets you manage users and levels of access without relying on support and in the straightforward flow you’re familiar with. Here’s a quick rundown of the benefits:

1. Single sign-on through Azure AD
2. Centralized hub to manage both access to the Cloud Management Portal and Sitefinity users
3. Granular permissions via roles per environment
4. Full control and self-service, no more dependence on support, no waiting time to process requests
5. User-friendly UI and coherent UX

Sitefinity customers in the cloud can now manage users completely independently. This is not a do-it-yourself-if-you-want-it-done-right sort of gig. It’s about self-service and independence, which are at the heart of every proper PaaS. It’s about giving you the right tools and the freedom to use them.

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