# Control Panel functions

The Liferay Portal Control Panel contains a large number of tools for system administrators as well as for power users.

You access the Control Panel from the Dock. The left menu has a list of tool sections, with each section containing a number of user and administrator tool components. The following sample shows all the sections collapsed, except for the Discovery Framework section.

The default function headings are briefly described below.

Power users generally use the Control Panel to access Discovery Framework administrative components, such as the Data Sources, Attribute Settings, and Framework Settings components.

## User Name section

The User Name section (Test Test in the sample) is the logged-in user's personal space, which can be managed with these functions:

- My Account lets you edit your user information, including changing your login password.
- My Pages lets you edit your public and private pages.

## Discovery Framework section

Power users generally use the Control Panel to access the administrative components in the Discovery Framework section:

- The Data Sources component views and reloads data sources.
- The Data Source Bindings component associates data sources with components.
- The Attribute Settings component creates and modifies attribute sets.
- The Framework Settings component provides access to state, security, and other settings.
- The Performance Metrics component displays information about component and MDEX Engine query performance.

For details on these components, see the "Administrative Components" chapter.

## Portal section

The Portal section is intended for portal administrators to manage the user community. The administrative components in this section are:

- The Users component adds and modifies user accounts.
- The Organizations component creates and edits Organizations, which are hierarchical collections of users.
- The Communities component creates and edits Communities, which are collections of users who have a common interest.
- The User Groups component creates and edits User Groups, which are simple, arbitrary collections of users.
- The Roles component manages the three types of roles, which are used to define permissions across their scope. The types of roles are a Portal role (which grants access across the portal), Community role (which grants access only within a single Community), and Organization role (which grants access only within a single Organization). The portal administrator can use these roles to control permissions in the application, such as who gets to see which pages.
- The Password Policies component sets the password rules, such as the password strength and the password expiration.
- The Settings component configures most of the global portal settings, including authentication, e-mail configuration, and the default landing page.
- The Monitoring component monitors all the live sessions in the portal (if monitoring is enabled).
- The Plugins Configuration component configures which portal roles have access to the plugins.

## Server section

The Server section provides the following administration functions:

- The Server Administration component allows you to perform administrative tasks for the overall portal server, including resource management, setting log levels, data migration between databases, e-mail server configuration, and shutting down the Liferay Portal server.
- The Portal Instances component lets you add and configure multiple portal instances on a single server.
- The Plugins Installation component lets you view the installed plugins and also add new ones.

## Layout Control section

- The Web Content component lets you add Web content, structures, templates, and RSS feeds.
- The Links component lets you add folder links.