Authorize multiple custom menu-items (extension) in navigation panel as alternative to portal pages

In Cognos 10 we made use of portal pages a lot. Since these portal pages are not available anymore in Cognos Analytics 11 (at least there not actively supported) we are looking for a good alternative. 

Our goal is to create a menu structure within the navigation panel so end users can navigate to reports/dashboard. So I create for each department an icon in the navigation panel using an extension.

These menuitems refer to a subfolder within the folder \teamcontent\portals. E.g. when you click “HRM” you will be directed to the folder \teamcontent\portals\hrm and if you choose "Finance" you will be directed to the folder \teamcontent\portals\finance.

To be able to authorize these menuitems, I... 

• Created a role for each department.
• For each role I customized the available features. I disabled all menuitems except the menu corresponding to the department. I disabled the team content item as well. So I configured this for each role in a similar way depending on the department.
• I changed the priority of all roles to priority 8 so is prevails above the license role which has a lower priority.

Well, everything works fine as long as a user is responsible for only one department. When I need to authorize somebody for two or more departments only one menuitem is shown in the navigation panel.

When authorized the user for HRM only, the menuitem HRM is shown -> OK
When authorized the user for both HRM and Finance only HRM is shown -> Not OK.

I think using customizations through an extension like this are very neat and could be very powerful since portal pages are not available anymore in release 11. So therefor I don’t want to use portal pages.

Unfortunately there is no proper way to configure it correctly. Since we want to authorize various combinations of menu items there is no other way than expose all menu items to all users and only authorize the content of the folders. So when they click a menu item they are not authorized to see, they won’t see any content. That nullifies the whole user experience.

So briefly said, you should be able to authorize multiple custom menu items to a role