Managing Users

The following basic user types exist in Oracle Social Network:

• Participant: Participants are users who are employees of your company; this category includes most other user types. Participants can create conversations, post messages, assign flags to other users, and so on. They are normally created when your organization configures users in the Oracle Cloud, but they also can be invited by other participants. A participant is typically a user whose email address (user name) exists within your organization's email domain.

  Within your environment, you might have two types of participant users; these two participants are not distinguished from each other in Oracle Social Network. For example, in an Oracle Cloud Application CRM integration you might have 50 licenses; these 50 users have access to both CRM and Oracle Social Network. These users are added to Oracle Social Network and they are participant users. You can invite additional users within the company to use Oracle Social Network, but they do not have access to CRM; these non-CRM users are also participant users.

  Employee users are also participants. An employee is typically a user whose email address (user name) exists outside your organization's email domain but they are still employees who are entitled to full Oracle Social Network access, possibly including service administrator permissions. You must explicitly add or invite them to join Oracle Social Network. When these added/invited users log in, they become Participant users. To allow employee users in your environment, you use the Extended Collaboration page in the Administration UI. For more information, see Managing User Collaboration.

  Administrator: An administrator is a user who has been given additional administrative privileges. Administrators can log in to the Oracle Social Network web client to do administration tasks. There are two types of administrators: site and service. Service administrators have access to features that allow them to do all the typical management tasks for users, social definitions, and more. Site administrators are Oracle personnel who have access to extended functionality for Oracle Social Network administration. The site administrator privilege is not managed in the administration UI.

• Integration account: This account type is for a program, not a user; it authenticates to Oracle Social Network to integrate custom applications. An integration account is not visible in the user interface. Optionally, you can allow the integration account to act on behalf of actual users. This privilege lets the integrating program do tasks as a user who is not logged in to Oracle Social Network, such as posting a message from an on-premise application as if it were posted by a user.

  Caution: You can also optionally allow the integration account to access any data in Oracle Social Network for any user. This privilege can be used for applications that require access to this secured data, such as custom search indexing, eDiscovery, and compliance. Make sure the credentials to this account are held securely.

• Outside user: An outside user is a user whose email address (user name) exists outside your organization's email domain and who is not an employee of your company. Outside users cannot be given administrator permissions. For users outside your email domain, you must explicitly add or invite them to join Oracle Social Network. To allow outside users in your environment, the Invitations option must be enabled, at least one value must exist in the Outside Users Whitelist field on the Extended Collaboration page, unless the Invite Outside Users with Any Email Domain check box is selected. To exclude outside users from a specific email domain, you can add the domain name to the Outside Users Blacklist field. If a user is invited from a domain in the blacklist, the invitation fails. For more information, see Managing User Collaboration.

When configured with an external user management system such as Oracle Identity Manager (OIM), general user properties are typically managed in that system. By default, when a user's general properties are changed in OIM, they are automatically propagated to Oracle Social Network when the user logs in. Your specific system configuration determines whether this change occurs.

By default, these properties are managed from OIM and are not editable in Oracle Social Network:

• Display Name

• E-mail address

• Manager

• Name (user ID/login)

• Organization

• Phone Number

• Title

Your environment might have more or fewer properties managed in OIM, depending on your specific configuration.

Role (privilege) properties can be changed from either OIM or from Oracle Social Network, and the changes are propagated to the other system. When role properties are changed using Oracle Identity Manager, it could take up to 10 minutes for that change to be visible in Oracle Social Network. The change is visible after that user logs in again. Changes made in Oracle Social Network become effective immediately in Oracle Identity Manager as well as Oracle Social Network.

Role properties include:

• Developer

• Service Administrator

• Employee

• Outside User

If your OIM settings become out of sync with Oracle Social Network, or if you want to replace property values for one or all users without waiting for the automatic sync that occurs during login, you can do this task either for an individual user or for all users at once. For more information, see Synchronizing User Profile Information with OIM.

1. Log in to Oracle Social Network as an administrator.
2. From the Administration UI, click Users. The Users page opens and displays the user list.
3. Click New User.
4. Type an email address and click Create. An email invitation is sent to the address you specify; the email contains a URL that the user can click to access Oracle Social Network.

   When the user clicks the invitation link, the browser client's password setup page displays. After the user logs in to Oracle Social Network for the first time, the Verified status appears in green text for that user in the user list.

By default, when you create/invite one or more users to Oracle Social Network, a new user invitation email is sent at these times:

• A new user invitation email is sent immediately.

• If the new user has not accessed Oracle Social Network, a second invitation email is sent two days after the user is created.

• If the new user still has not accessed Oracle Social Network, a third invitation email is sent three days after the user is created.

In some cases (such as when creating users in bulk, or if your system is not being used in production yet) you might not want to send invitation emails to new users. If you disable all email notifications for more than three days, no invitation emails are sent. For more information about the global email notification setting, see Editing General Properties.

1. Log in to Oracle Social Network as an administrator.
2. From the Administration UI, click Users. The Users page opens. The page is empty until you find the user you want to enable or disable.
3. Search for the user, using the instructions in Finding a User.
4. Click Edit for the user you want to enable or disable. The properties page opens.
5. Select or deselect the This User Account is Enabled check box.
6. Click Save.

1. Log in to Oracle Social Network as an administrator.
2. From the Administration UI, click Users. The Users page opens.
3. Search for the user, using the instructions in Finding a User.
4. Select the user whose properties you want to change. The properties page opens.
5. Edit the properties of the user. For more information about user properties, see User Properties Page.
6. Click Save.

If your OIM settings become out of sync with Oracle Social Network, or if you want to replace property values for one or all users without waiting for the automatic sync that occurs during login, you can do this task either for an individual user or for all users at once.

To synchronize profile information for an individual user, open the user's properties page and click Sync Profile Now.

To synchronize profile information for all users at once, open the Users page and click Sync Profile Data.