Bookmark Support for External (Non-Local) Users

The Virtual Office bookmark system allows bookmarks to be created at both the group and user levels. The administrator can create both group and user bookmarks which are propagated to applicable users, while individual users can create only personal bookmarks.

Because bookmarks are stored within the SMA appliance’s local configuration files, it is necessary for group and user bookmarks to be correlated to defined group and user entities. When working with local (LocalDomain) groups and users, this is automated because the administrator must manually define the groups and users on the appliance. Similarly, when working with external (non-LocalDomain, for example, RADIUS or LDAP) groups, the correlation is automated because creating an external domain creates a corresponding local group.

However, when working with external (non-LocalDomain) users, a local user entity must exist so that any

user-created (personal) bookmarks can be stored within the Secure Mobile Access configuration files. The need to store bookmarks on the SMA appliance itself is because LDAP and RADIUS external domains do not provide a direct facility to store such information as bookmarks.

Rather than requiring administrators to manually create local users for external domain users to use personal bookmarks, the SMA appliance automatically creates a corresponding local user entity upon user login.

Bookmarks can be added to the locally created user.

For example, if a RADIUS domain called myRADIUS is created, and RADIUS user jdoe logs on to the SMA appliance, the moment jdoe adds a personal bookmark, a local user called jdoe is created on the SMA appliance as type External, and can then be managed like any other local user by the administrator. The external local user remains until deleted by the administrator.