Hi folks, I'm new to DNN and have been charged with writing a new customer portal.  Our existing site runs on DNN so I thought DNN would be a good first port-of-call to review for the development of the new system, but I was wondering if I could clarify a few points that are fairly crucial:-

We have existing users registered on our DNN site and ideally we would want use these registrations to access the new customer portal so we have a single point of sign-on for access to the various functions within our site (we currently have restricted pages that only authenticated users can access).  Only certain of those users should be able to access to customer portal functions, so I was thinking I could/should use a new set of roles to control access to the new pages, as this hooks into the DNN security model and would be easily entensible as we add more functionality.  However, we would want the administration of this new role to be managed by the other departments, but obviously we wouldn't want them to have general administration rights over either the users or the site content, nor for different departments to be able to change each others settings - for example, general access to the portal would be enabled by sales, but only accounts should be able to allow specific users into the accouting reports we would publish.  Can I set up users with administration rights to specific roles?

I'm looking to create a bunch of screens to initially include order search and detail, finance reports, product search and request that need to integrate into existing databases so I was thinking I would need to create these new functions as modules, correct?

As this is hooking into various existing databases, we need to set up underlying sets of data filters, by user, to control what each user can see - for example they should only be able to view orders for accounts that they have been assigned to.  To control this I was proposing to have tables in our production database with the DNN user unique id and then the various parameters that would be applied to that user.  The data retrieval stored procedures would then require the UID to be passed in and then would and say, for example, something along the lines of
SELECT * FROM Orders WHERE EXISTS (SELECT * FROM UserOrderFilters WHERE UserOrderFilters.UserUID = @uid AND UserOrderFilters.AllowedAccount = Orders.AccountNumber) AND .... <user selection parameters here>
so that we restrict the base data the customer portal users can see (and if they haven't been set up with anything, they won't see any data at all) - but obviously this then needs a module to administer this (again, this would be separated in sales, accounts, etc) - could I pull up a list of all the site users within such a module being used by a non-adminstrator account for validation purposes or would this, again, require DNN site admin-level access?

If there's anything that need clarifying, please let me know - I appreciate this is fairly complex

Cheers
MH