Configuring your portal’s general security policy

Public or private?

The most important choice is whether your portal should be public or private. That is whether you want anonymous users to be able to access the portal or if you’ll require people to signup before they can access anything.

Important

Making your portal public doesn’t mean that anybody will have access to all of the datasets! You’ll always be able to limit what the general public can see through the use of sensible default security parameters for your datasets and explicit parameters on each single dataset.

See the dedicated section for more information about dataset security.

This setting can be found in the security subsection of the configuration section of your portal’s backoffice.

Note that if you decide not to allow anonymous users to access your portal, they will be redirected to the login page unless you’d rather they land on a specific page you’ve written.

Allow anonymous access to your portal

Signup policy

No matter your choice of public or private, you can then decide on who will be able to become a registered member of your portal. In order to do this, go to the Configuration/Signup subsection of your portal’s backoffice.

Enable people to register

Closed signup policy

If you decide not to allow people to signup freely, the only way of adding members to your portal will be through direct email invitation.

Open signup policy

If on the other hand you allow people to register, you’ll then have to decide whether you want to manually approve each access request to your portal or not. Note that whatever your decision, each member of the portal able to manage users will receive a notification for each new access request.

Request manual approval of each access request

Do not forget to add the signup button to your header’s menu or people won’t see a signup form until they try to access a restricted area of your portal.

Add signup link to your header's menu

The signup process is usually very straightforward: an email, a password and that’s it. You can however decide to customize the experience by setting up a custom text as disclaimer, request users to accept your terms and conditions and even require that they leave a message for the portal’s administrator (useful when you want to manually approve access requests).

Customize the signup form

Granting access for all of your organisation’s members

If your organisation already has its own credentials management system, you can set up a bridge between your identity provider and your OpenDataSoft portal. This will give general access to your portal (no specific rights) to each of your organisation’s members.

You’ll find more information about setting up such a bridge on the SAML configuration documentation page.

Configuring the users’ authenticated sessions timeout

By default, all authenticated users are automatically logged out after a 2-week inactivity period. This duration can be changed in the Configuration/Security section of the backoffice.

Note that every user request to the portal resets the timeout, so sessions can actually last longer than the timeout duration.