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By default, each user in your domain can create blogs, a personal information page, and store files in an individual portfolio space. Students can submit items from their portfolio to meet the requirements of assignments in their courses.

You can choose to disable personal information pages, blogs and/or portfolios for different groups of users defined for your domain (e.g., Faculty, Adjunct, Staff, Student). If the "Modify User" utility in User Management is used to explicitly set availability of these tools for a particular user, that will override the corresponding settings determined by the user's affiliation.

If you choose to enable portfolios, default quotas (in MB) can similarly be set to vary by institutional affiliation. If a user is affiliated with more than one group, whichever default quota is largest for the different groups is the one which applies. Institutional types are defined in the "Institutional user types" section on the "Default authentication, language, timezone, portal, types" screen. If no types have been defined, then a single default quota will apply for all users from the domain.

Default portfolio quotas which can be set for users in your domain will be overridden by any quota you set for an individual user via: the "Modify User" utility.

Additional options for authoring spaces can be set for the various user types: (a) whether webDAV is active, and (b) the default quota for Authoring Space. These only come into effect for a particular user, when an author and/or one or more co-author roles have been assigned to a user to provide access to one or more Authoring Spaces.

WebDAV allows a user to connect to an Authoring Space in the same way as removable media, and to use their own laptop/desktop computer's file management tools and applications to move, edit and delete files. See: "WebDAV access to Authoring Space" section in the Authoring manual for more information.

Note: webDAV usage requires Apache with SSL to be running on the library server. The user will be prompted to enter his/her username (this will be the LON-CAPA username or username,domain if the access is for a co-author with a domain different to that of the author), and the user's LON-CAPA password. webDAV also requires that the dav and dav_fs modules are enabled in Apache. The way those are enabled depends on the Linux distro (command line access required). the Apache config.

(Reload Apache after making any changes to the Apache configuration).

If you use Single Sign On to authenticate LON-CAPA users in your domain, then to support webDAV you also need to support authentication by LON-CAPA for your users. This can achieved if the authentication type stored internally for each SSO user is set to either (a) Kerberos 5 (with a parameter - the appropriate Kerberos realm set), or (b) Local Authentication, with /home/httpd/lib/perl/localauth.pm customized to verify username and password (e.g., via LDAP). If a user can log-in to LON-CAPA via the URL /adm/login (thereby by-passing SSO), then the same user will also be able to authenticate using a WebDAV client (assuming other requirements are met, i.e., SSL, WebDAV access enabled, active author or co-author role).

The requirement to obsolete published files before moving or deleting them, which applies to the regular web browser-based management of Authoring Space, also applies in the webDAV environment. Moving and deleting directories in the webDAV environment is prohibited if the directory, or any (nested) subdirectory contains a non-obsolete published resource.

Given the ability to easily delete unpublished content in webDAV (without the ability to reverse the deletion), it is important that authors assigned webDAV access are especially careful when working in the webDAV environment.