Basic Administration > Managing User Participation > Participant Administration > Working with Participants
  
Working with Participants
Windchill uses the term participant to mean a user, group, or organization, or any combination of users, groups, and organizations. The Participant Administration utility allows administrators to manage user, group and organization objects using actions. For more information about actions, see Using the Participant Administration Utility.
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The set of user, group, and organization objects that you can manage is determined by the context from which you open the Participant Administration utility and the administration privileges that you have. For information about opening the Participant Administration utility from a specific Windchill context and having the required permissions, see About Access Permissions.
For additional reference information about participants and participant administration, see Participants (Users, Groups, and Organizations).
Objects Managed through the Participant Administration Utility
The Participant Administration utility allows administrators to manage the following Windchill objects:
Windchill Object
Description
User
Holds user information for those participants who have access to Windchill. This information includes the user name, the Unique Federation Identifier (UFID) associated with the participant, the Windchill domain of the user, and administrative flags that keep track of objects that become disabled or that need to be repaired. The UFID contains the distinguished name of the user and identifies the directory service where user entries reside.
A Windchill user object is automatically created the first time the participant is selected from a search or the first time the participant logs on to Windchill. As an administrator, you can also create, edit, and delete user objects through the Participant Administration utility.
Group
Identifies selected users, organizations, and possibly other groups, under one name. You can create groups so that you can apply administrative policies (such as those for access control, indexing, and notification policies) to sets of participants, rather than to each one individually.
Groups are associated with the context in which they are created. From the Participant Administration utility, you have access to only groups created in the current context or in ancestor contexts. For information about contexts, see About Contexts.
A Windchill group object holds the group name, the UFID associated with the group, the Windchill domain of the group, and administrative flags that keep track of objects that become disabled or need to be repaired. The UFID contains the distinguished name of the group and identifies the directory service where group entries reside.
Groups can be members of other groups. Some groups, such as Administrators, are predefined in Windchill.
Organization
Holds information about a company, company division, university, or some other list of people whose user directory entries include the organization name defined for the object. For example, if the organization name is DIV1, then all users in the directory services specified for the organization who have their organization attribute (o, by default) set to DIV1 are members of the DIV1 organization.
A Windchill organization object holds the organization name, the UFID associated with the organization, the Windchill domain of the organization, and administrative flags that keep track of if the object needs to be repaired or is disabled. The UFID contains the distinguished name of the organization and identifies the directory service where organization entries reside.
Organization participants can be associated with organization contexts. Throughout this set of topics, information about creating, deleting, and editing organizations describes the use of organization participants and not organization contexts. For information about organizational contexts, see the Organizations guide.
In addition to managing users, groups and organizations, the Participant Administration utility allows you to perform the following maintenance activities on participants:
Remove the contents of the entire participant cache.
Remove participants from Windchill.
Search the Windchill database for user, group, and organization objects that do not have valid distinguished names.
Repair known user, group, and organization objects for which the distinguished name stored in the object no longer exists. During normal operation, Windchill keeps track of those objects it encounters that do not have a valid distinguished name.