Setup - Move (some) Configuration from Administration to Setup

1 Initial Problem

There currently is no clear guideline which configuration should go to the setup and which configuration should go into the admin-menu in the system. There is some configuration in the administration menu (e.g. Java-Server) that can only be made by a technical person with knowledge of the server. On the other hand, there is configuration in the setup (e.g. Contact Information) that an administrator in the system might want to edit. The distribution of configuration options between the setup and the administrator menu thus should be reevaluated.

As a first step we propose to move some configuration from the Administration to the setup.

2 Conceptual Summary

We propose to introduce a new guideline to clarify how configuration should be distributed between the setup and and the administration in the plattform. This guideline implies, that the following configuration should be moved from the administration to the setup:

• General Settings
  • Server 
    • Proxy Server (Host and Port)
    • Java-Server (Host and Port)
    • SOAP
    • HTTPS
• Chat Room
  • Settings
    • Chatserver Settings (Selected)

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

The administration screens inside the installation, as listed above, will be modified.

3.2 User Interface Details

The administration screens inside the installation, as listed above, will be modified.

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

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4 Technical Information

-

5 Privacy Implications

No personal information will be stored when this feature is implemented.

6 Security Implications

From a security perspective it often is required to separate access to administrative interfaces from the access to user interfaces completely. From this perspective this change is a security improvement, because credentials from within the installation won't be usable for the configuration provided via this mechanism. This comes at the cost of loosing the possibility to attribute a change in the configuration to someone, if the installation is managed by various people in the backend. This could be understood to have negative impact on the security, but since changes in the setup currently are not logged for audit anyway this seems to be acceptable.

7 Contact

• Author of the Request: Klees, Richard [rklees]
• Maintainer: Klees, Richard [rklees], Meyer, Stefan [smeyer], Jansen, Michael [mjansen], Killing, Alexander [alex]
• Implementation of the feature is done by: CaT ILIAS Team

8 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• …

9 Discussion

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 03 AUG 2020 : We like this feature request and will schedule it in two weeks on the next Jour Fixe. Please suggest additional settings that should be moved to the Setup (see also related Guideline for Configuration in the Setup). We agree that some of the external mail settings should be moved to the setup.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 14 SEP 2020: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 7.

10 Implementation

The settings for the chatroom have been moved to the CLI setup. The details on how the new config can be used can be found in the documentation of the chatroom. The other configuration has been moved as described as well. All configuration available in the setup can be found in the README of the setup.

Test Cases

The configuration of the chatroom is covered by the testcases for the chatroom. They all require the chatroom to be configured.

Approval

Approved at 2021-05-05 by Klees, Richard [rklees], tested by Uwe Tesche a lot. Thanks!