Request information

  • The Website Owner is the primary contact person for a website and may be contacted by the Oxford Mosaic or Information Security teams on any important matters affecting the Mosaic service. Details of website Owner responsibilities are available in the Mosaic SLA

  • Each website can have only one Website Owner, but it is possible to assign a Website Administrator role to other users

  • Website Ownership can be transferred to another Website Administrator when you leave the role

Back to Your SSO

  • By default the website title appears in your website's Header

  • The website title can be changed and configured to display or not in the Site Details

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  • The website's domain will be created in the format [prefix].web.ox.ac.uk

  • The domain cannot be changed after the site is provisioned

  • If you reference a year in your prefix (e.g. 'conference2021') and later want to update it, you will need to add a custom domain. We advise avoiding using years in prefixes

  • The domain is suitable as a public address and will always exist for the website. It is also the address used to edit the website

  • It is also possible to add up to 2 custom domains to the website. See Set up a web address for your site for more details

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  • Emails sent from the website to its registered users will use this address as the 'from' address

  • The email address should be appropriate for users to reply to

  • The website email address can be changed once the website is provisioned. See Site Details documentation

Back to Website email address

Oxford Only access restriction

  • When enabled, access restriction can be applied to individual pages and files on a website to prompt the web user to login with their Oxford SSO in order to view the page or file

  • Access restriction can be requested at any time after site creation

  • As stated in the Oxford Mosaic Web CMS Platform Terms of Usage, Mosaic is designated to hold Public information only: it is not managed as a repository suitable for storing Internal or Sensitive content. 'Oxford Only' functionality is provided solely to enable customisation of the site navigation experience of users, to help ensure they see only content relevant to them; it is NOT to ‘Secure’ content. Mosaic should only be used to store Public content

  • Oxford Only access restriction provides two levels of restriction: restrict access to all Oxford users (see 'Access Oxford-only content on University website' in the University card entitlements table ); or, restrict to University staff only. Mosaic does not provide the granular permissions and security auditing tools used by Intranets

  • Mosaic is for publishing websites with mainly public content, and site performance can be adversely affected if a site contains a large amount of restricted-access content. In this case, or if you are setting up an Intranet, or need fine-grained access controls for content, SharePoint Online is the recommended platform.

External (non-SSO) editors

  • External editors are content editors on your site who do not belong to the University and so do not have an Oxford SSO ID. This will apply to websites for multi-institution research projects or partnerships

  • External editor functionality can be requested at any time after site creation

  • You do not need to check this option to enable public users to view your website: this is enabled by default

Back to Website configuration

  • Most site requests need the named approver to be one of the following people (or closest equivalent role) in your unit:
    • Head of main Department
    • Faculty Board Chair
    • Head of House
    • Departmental Administrator
    • Head of Administration and Finance
    • College Finance Bursar

For student clubs and societies the approver needs to be their registered Senior Member, who must be a member of Congregation.

  • We understand that governance for the web within University units may not require direct approval from the academic Head or the Head of Finance for the unit, but with Mosaic we are not able to adjust our site setup processes to be tailored to the specific governance arrangements of each unit, as they vary so widely across the University. We have no way of verifying if the approvers proposed are the correct people or not, so we simply require that either the academic Head or Head of Finance for the unit is named as the authorisor for the request, as these two roles are common and senior in every department.
  • When you submit the form, a copy of it will be sent to your named approver

  • The named approver does not need to send the Mosaic team approval via email as we assume approval has been provided prior to submitting the request; the email notification the named approver receives is just confirmation of the request being submitted from within their unit and is for their visibility

  • We also send a copy of each website request to a maillist address for the owning department and its division. If people in your department/division other than the named approver need visibility of Mosaic website requests originating from your unit and its sub-units, they can be subscribed to the mailing list to be automatically copied in to any new Mosaic website requst within the unit. The list can be setup in Sympa , the University's mailing list management system, and your local IT Staff should be able to assist with this. Using the Mosaic request maillist is not compulsory, we just offer this mechanism as a way for departments and divisions to manage authorisations in the specific way they wish, in addition to the general process we use

Back to Website governance