Managing User Accounts

A user account represents a person using the application. Everything about a person's activity in the application is associated with their user account. From a person's user account page in the admin console, you can view their profile information, their activity (such as content they've posted), change their password, and delete their account.

Be sure to see Managing User Accounts and User Groups for overview information on how accounts work.

Note that if your community uses an external user identity system (such as LDAP or Active Directory) to manage user data, you won't by default be able to use the admin console to edit information managed there. Console fields corresponding to data in the external system will be disabled, and you won't be able to delete users from the admin console. (Typically, the external system stores profile information about the user, while information about their activity in the application is stored in the application database.)

For more information about using LDAP or Active Directory with Jive SBS, take a look at the ) LDAP and Active Directory Guide.

Admin Console: People > Management > User Search

Admin Console: People > Management > Create User

Managing User Account Information

Each user account has a page in the admin console where you can get information and perform actions on the account. To get to this page, in the admin console go to the user Search page, then browse or search for the user's account. Click the user's name to view their user summary page.

Admin Console: People > Management > User Search

Profile Information

Among the user properties you'll see information that's part of the user's profile. Much of this is the same information that the rest of the community sees when they view the user's profile in the end user UI.

Password

You can change the password for a user account. Note that an administrator can configure the application to enable people to request their own password reset. If that feature is disabled, then you can reset the password from the User Summary page.

Note: The application doesn't send an email to the person whose password you changed when it's changed this way.

Enabled

You can disable a user account, removing their access but keep their content in the system. For more information, see Deleting and Disabling User Accounts.

User Activity in the Community

You can view lists of the documents, discussion messages, and blog posts that a person has contributed or worked on. The User Properties lists will display quantities for each, and you can view a list of the items themselves by clicking the name of the kind of item you want to view.

Visiblity Settings

You can choose whether or not a person's name and email address are visible to others in the community.

An administrator can configure the application so that a person can set the visibility of their own name and email address. If that's the case, then the user will be able to change the setting independently of the setting you make in the admin console. In other words, if you change it, they can change it back.

Group Membership

If the user account is a member of user groups, links to those accounts will be displayed among the user properties.

User groups are a way to collect user accounts to more easily manage user access and permissions. For more information about them, see Managing Group Accounts

Email Notifications

The User Properties list displays the number of email notifications the person is signed up for. To see a list of the notifications, click the number.

For an introduction to email notifications, see What are email notifications?

Avatars

If a person has uploaded their own avatars, their User Summary page will display the images they've uploaded. You can delete avatar images from this page.

For more on managing avatars, see Avatar Settings

User Properties

User properties are simple name-value pairs that programmers can use to work with the user account in their code. User properties are often used as a way to keep track of extra information about the user account. A user can have multiple properties. When you're working with properties, remember that entering the name and value for an existing property will update that property's value to the one you entered.

Adding User Accounts

When you need to create user accounts, you do so on the admin console's Create User page. By default, if your community uses LDAP or Active Directory to manage users, new user accounts you create from the admin console will go into the local application database (where content is stored). You will be able to edit user account properties for LDAP-managed users if your LDAP provider allows it (by default, it isn't allowed).

Admin Console: People > Management > Create User

On the Create User page, enter basic information, including user name, "friendly" name, email address, and password. You can also request to send the new user a welcome email. (For more on the template a welcome email is created from, see Managing Email Templates.)
Note: A user name may not contain any of the following characters: , / ? & #
Click a button to continue. In general, you should edit properties for the user account while you're creating it. That's because the new account doesn't yet have permission to do anything in the community.
- To create this new account and edit its properties now, click the Create User button. For more about the account properties you can edit, see Managing User Account Information.
- To create this account and move on to creating another (without editing account properties), click the Create & Create Another User button.

Deleting and Disabling User Accounts

You can disable or delete a user account when you want to remove the person's presence from the community. You can disable or delete from either the User Search page, where user accounts are listed, or from the account's user summary page.

Note: An administrator can also ban someone if you merely want to prevent their having access to the community. For more information about banning, see Banning People.

Disabling a user account removes their access but keeps their content in the system. When you disable someone's account, Jive SBS will replace their former avatar with a special avatar that features a strikethrough; the word "Disabled" will appear on their profile. The person will no longer be able to log in or receive notifications, but their content will remain viewable in the application.
Deleting a person's user account also deletes the content they've contributed. This is a permanent action that, depending on the user's amount of activity, can have an impact on content throughout the community. If you're not sure whether you want to delete the account, consider banning or disabling the user instead.
When you delete a user account, you begin the deletion by clicking the link. However, the actual deletion might take a few minutes to finish, depending on how much content is associated with the account.

CAUTION:
Deleting someone's account is permanent. You'll be deleting everything about the user's presence in the system. This includes in some cases content that was created by other people (such as replies to the deleted user's posts). Be sure to read the warnings on the Delete User page!