Managing User Collaboration

These topics discuss how to manage user collaboration:

Enabling Extended User Collaboration

If enabled, any user other than an outside user can invite others who don't have Oracle Cloud accounts to collaborate in Oracle Social Network. You can allow two types of extended collaboration:

Employee collaboration: these users have full user abilities.
Outside user collaboration: these users have limited access to Oracle Social Network content and a restricted set of abilities. Outside users cannot be given administrator or developer permissions. Outside users can be partners, suppliers, and so on.

For more information about the types of users, see User Types.

Note: Not all environments allow extended collaboration. If your system does not have this capability, the option does not display in the user interface.

To enable extended user collaboration:

Log in to Oracle Social Network as an administrator.
From the Administration UI, click Extended Collaboration.
Enable the Invitations option.
Edit the Employee Whitelist, Outside Users Whitelist, and Outside Users Blacklist fields as needed to specify email domains from which users can be invited or excluded. If the Invite Outside Users with Any Email Domain check box is selected, you do not need to specify domains in the whitelist to invite external users. For more information about collaboration properties, see User Collaboration Settings.
Add your company's "base" domains into the Employee Whitelist field. For example, if you log in to Oracle Social Network as lia.kuang@example.com, put example.com in the Employee Whitelist field. If you skip this step, you will be unable to log in to Oracle Social Network after saving your change and logging out.
Click Save.

User Collaboration Settings

The following table describes the user settings for extended collaboration.

Element	Description
Employees	In this section you can define which external email addresses can be invited as employee users to Oracle Social Network.
Employee Whitelist	This field is editable only if Invitations are enabled. If you want to allow employee users outside your enterprise domain to join Oracle Social Network as Participant users, you must add at least one domain in the whitelist. Invitations can be sent only to email addresses that match a domain name in the employee whitelist. For example, if you specify `example.com`, then a person with the email address first.last@example.com can be invited to join Oracle Social Network as a Participant (full privileges) user. The domain name value is not case-sensitive. To enter more than one domain, separate them with commas. If an invitee's email address matches any of the entries, it is allowed. Creating a new employee account in Oracle Social Network triggers a corresponding account creation process in an external database such as an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory service. Important Note: If you enable extended collaboration, you must add your company's domains into the Employee Whitelist field. For example, if you log in to Oracle Social Network as `lia.kuang@example.com`, put `example.com` in the Employee Whitelist field. If you skip this step, you will be unable to log in to Oracle Social Network after saving your changes and logging out.
Outside Users	In this section you can define which external email addresses can be invited as outside users to Oracle Social Network.
Outside Users Whitelist	This field is editable only if Invitations are enabled. If you want to allow users outside your enterprise domain to join Oracle Social Network, you must add at least one domain to the whitelist, unless the Invite Outside Users with Any Email Domain check box is selected. If the check box is not selected, invitations can be sent only to email addresses that match a domain name in the list. For example, if you specify `example.com`, then a person with the email address first.last@example.com can be invited to join Oracle Social Network as an outside (limited privileges) user. The domain name value is not case-sensitive. To enter more than one domain, separate them with commas. If an invitee's e-mail address matches any of the entries, it is allowed. Creating a new outside user account in Oracle Social Network triggers a corresponding account creation process in an external database such as an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory service.
Outside Users Blacklist	This field is editable only if Invitations are enabled. If you want to exclude users from a domain outside your enterprise domain from joining Oracle Social Network, you can add the domain to the blacklist. If a user is invited from a domain in the blacklist, the invitation fails.