Portal Concepts and Glossary

Introduction

This page provides a definition for the various terms and concepts you will find used in Portal and the supporting documentation.

Organisation

Organisations in Portal represent Organisations in the real world, they manage users and own Accounts.

Account

Accounts are ways to group things that belong together permissions wise and financially. Many Organisations will only need one Account, but if you are using OmniStream for multiple large workstreams or if you have different customers you are using OmniStream to stream to, Accounts are a great way to segregate access and accounting.

Folder

Folders belong to an Account and store Assets. You can store lots of Assets in one folder or have a folder per Asset. Folders are linked to Projects to give that project access to the Assets within that folder. Often one Folder per Project works well, but sometimes it's useful to be able to share some Assets across multiple Projects, while keeping other Assets only accessible to a single Project, this can be easily achieved by keeping Assets in separate Folders.

Asset & Asset Version

Assets are the Portal representation of your applications. Assets are stored in Folders. You should have an Asset for each application you have and then each upload of that application becomes an Asset Version. Asset Versions are what get deployed to Render Services for users to connect and stream that specific build of that application.

Project

Projects bring together your Assets and manage the Render Services Asset Versions are deployed to. To access Assets within a Project you link one or more Folders to that Project, the project gains access only to Assets inside Folders that have been linked in this way. This allows Projects to segregate workstreams within an Account.

Render Service

Render Services belong to Projects and control access to your uploaded Assets. An Asset Version is available to stream by virtue of being deployed to a service. Render Services have a unique address that doesn't change, so you can deploy updates without having to send out new links or update your web code. A Render Service can host multiple Assets at the same time which each having a unique connection parameter so you can direct users to the right application. You might only need one service, which is used occasionally or you might have a "live" service that is customer facing 24/7 and "dev" service which you do all your development and testing on before pushing QA'd Asset Versions to the "live" service. For more information see Render Services