Site access and user management

Website access within the Ensemble CMS is managed by the web admins for individual websites. Only an existing web admin can add users to a site. If you do not know who the web admins are for a particular site, please contact the communicator for your College or other administrative unit.

Users will log into Ensemble via https://author.ensemble.vt.edu

NOTE: CMS support personnel do not manage users for sites beyond initial site setup and for rescuing abandoned sites. If a ticket is submitted for user management tasks, the web admins for the site will be provided.

Adding users

Users are managed through the university’s Enterprise Directory Group Manager. As a web admin, you can determine the number of users and roles they have within your site. To add or remove users, go to the group manager.

Login with your VT Username (formerly known as a PID) and your passphrase.

Once the group manager loads, you’ll see the site(s) that you can manage through the CMS and for each site, you will see separate group names for each role within the system. These include:

• Author — A user who can add/edit content. This includes uploading images and other assets to your site’s asset library. Authors cannot publish content without approval from publishers or web_admins.
• Publisher — A user who can publish content to the live site. Publishers automatically inherit the author role.
  
• Web_admin — Web_admins automatically inherit the publisher role, the author role, and can also add/remove users, adjust the site configuration settings, create vanity URLs, change the theme of the site (if allowed under brand guidance), and add CSS page body classes.

To add a member to any of these groups, click “Add” next to the group name and type in the person’s VT Username (PID) on the next page.

To remove a user, choose “Modify” next to the group name. Once clicked, you’ll see a listing of users who have that  level of access to your site. Select the checkbox next to the VT Username and choose the "Delete Member(s)" button.

The next time that user logs in, they should see the site listed under the My Sites section of Ensemble. If the user is already logged in, they'll need to exit (sign out) and log back in to see their new site permissions.

Workflow notifications will be sent until the removed users attempts to log into Ensemble. After removing a user from a site, they no longer have any ability to make changes but will still be asked for approvals until they attempt to log into Authoring. Also, users with attempt to any CMS site such as the CMS Sandbox, have read access to published and unpublished pages and assets of all sites. Although you can remove write access, users with any read access have read access to all of Ensemble.

Pubilishers automatically have all the abilities of authors while web_admins automatically have all the abilities of publishers and authors. You do not need to add VT Usernames to multiple roles on each site.

Every night, newly added web_admins will be automatically added to author, publisher, and web_admin groups as a manager. Being a manager allows them to add users to these groups. Likewise, removal from a web_admin group will eventually result in the removal of management of the groups which means they can no longer add or remove people from roles.

Web_admins can remove themselves from groups that they administer. Sometimes web_admins will remove themselves and end up in a state where they cannot add themselves back.