Managing members

This topic is organized into the following sections:

• About eRoom membership

• Individual member information

• Member groups

• Member lists

• Large member lists

• Searching large member lists

• Managing community membership

• Managing guest membership

• Managing members as site administrator

About eRoom membership

eRoom users are called members. An eRoom member can be an individual user, or a set of eRoom users in a named group. All the members of an eRoom site are organized and managed in the context of communities. Members are either created in a community as local members, or brought into a community as external members by way of external-membership directories connected to the community -- both are native members of that community, and that community is their home community. Each eRoom member has just one home community in their site, but can belong to other communities as a guest member. eRooms derive their members from the native and guest members of the community in which they are located.

See also:

• Diagram of eRoom membership (opens in a pop-up window)

• Enterprise directories (for information about managing external members)

• Managing local members and groups (later in this topic)

Individual member information

eRoom keeps member information about all of its members. You can change your own information, but unless you are an administrator, or have appropriate permissions, you can only look at this information about other members.

See also: In "Logging in to eRoom", the following procedures:

• To change your password

• To change your email address

• To change your personal question

• To change your client option

To get member information:

• To open your own Member Information page, go to your My eRooms page and click .

• To open a Member Information page for yourself or for another member, on a Member list page, click either a member name, or, if you have edit rights, click the edit icon () next to it.
  
  If the member is part of a group, click the group name, and then click the name of the member.

• To open a Member Information page for yourself or for another member, click and pick "See info" from the pop-up menu.

Member Information page

On a Member Information page, you can edit any field that provides an editing control (a text box for a text field, a check box for an option, and so forth). See Modifying member information (below) for information about who can change what settings and under what conditions.

Note: At the top of the Member Information page, site administrators only can see a "Member ID" field (also called the User ID, or UID field) that uniquely identifies community members. eRoom uses member UIDs to keep track of new, merged, and deleted community members.

Fields in Member Information pages are as follows:

• First name, Middle name (optional), and Last name

• Initials -- This field is automatically populated as a member enters text in the first name, middle name, and last name fields.

• Display name -- The way eRoom shows a member's name in contexts other than columnar lists (for example, invitations, comments, and change logs). This field is required, and is automatically populated as the member edits text in the first name, middle name, and last name fields.
  
  If the display name contains Kanji characters, it is appended to the display name following a double space.
  
  Note: Members upgraded from eRoom versions prior to 7.2, or synched from NT, have their display names created in "First Last" format.

• Login name -- The name a member uses to log in to eRoom. This field is read-only when a community requires email addresses as login names. If an external member's eRoom login name is different than their external login name (because they were added through the Login-Name Conflict dialog), there are two login name fields:

• eRoom login -- for logging in to eRoom

• directory login -- the member's login name from the external directory that conflicted with an existing login name

• Content Server account information (eRoom Enterprise only) -- The user name and password that the eRoom member uses to log in to a Content Server repository when their login credentials are different from their eRoom login name and password.
  
  Unlike the user name field, the password field is never stored in eRoom. When member information page is saved, or when the repository login dialog is submitted, the password is used only to validate the user name field against all repositories currently visible to the member.

Note: Clearing the Content Server user name field, and saving your eRoom member information, erases your Content Server user name for all repositories. The next time you access a repository while these fields are blank, you are prompted for your user name and password. If you successfully log in, your Content Server user name is saved with your eRoom member information, and it is validated for that repository, and for all repositories currently visible to you, for which you have the same user name and password. Unless the user name field is blank, however, it is never overwritten automatically when you specify different login credentials in a login dialog for a repository.

• Organization (optional)

• Email -- The email address eRoom uses to contact the member.

• Instant message account (eRoom Instant Messaging Integration Services only) -- If instant messaging is enabled for the site, members in the Instant Messaging permissions group (with can be contacted via instant message permission) can have exactly one IM account in eRoom. If you can edit member info, the Account name (text field) and Network (drop-down list) controls are displayed, along with a "test" button. The "test" button is visible only to site and community administrators, coordinators, and to members on their own Member Information pages. Clicking "test" attempts to provision the account to an eRoom identity, get presence information for the account, and send an instant message to the account name at the selected network. If you cannot edit member info, (for example, if it is mapped to an LDAP field, or you don't have edit rights to member information), the account name and network are shown read-only.
  
  When IM account info is provided, the member icon shown in front of the account name can appear in the following potential states:
  
  -- online
  
  -- idle
  
  -- offline
  
  -- unknown

• Web page (optional)

• Other info (optional), might be renamed per Site Settings.

• Time zone -- The time zone a member selects when logging in to a site for the first time.

• Change password button -- Visible to local community members only if they have permission to change their own passwords. Also visible to administrators and to members with permission to set passwords.

• Change personal question button -- Visible to local community members if password recovery is enabled for the site.

• Authenticate against [name of membership directory] -- Identifies the external-membership directory connection from which the member's account was created, and against which the member is authenticated in subsequent member-list sync operations.

• Deactivated -- Identifies a member who cannot log in. An administrator or member with "Can modify the community member list" permission can select this check box to remove a member's ability to log in. To reactivate the member, clear the check box.

• Locked -- Appears only when an account is locked either because a member has too many failed login attempts, has exceeded the time threshold for logging in, or has as tried too many times to recover a password. The reason for locking appears next to an "Unlock" check box. An administrator or member with "Can modify the community member list" permission can clear this check this box to unlock a member's account.

• The date and time of the member's Last login, or "(none)" if the member has never logged in.

• Permissions -- Indicate which permissions the member has or does not have. They are:

• Can create eRooms

• Can create groups

• Can be contacted via instant message (Instant Messaging Integration Services only)

• Can see the community member list

• Can modify the community member list

• Can set passwords

• Community Administrator

• Site Administrator

The information you see in the Permissions section depends on your membership status (administrator or regular member) and whether you are looking at your own or another member's information.

When a member has a permission due to membership in a group, the text "(via the <group name> group)" appears after the name of the permission.

If you are a site administrator viewing a Member Information, you can click "See permissions for all communities" (a button only available to site administrators) to see a table listing the member's permissions in all communities to which they belong. To switch back to viewing the member's permissions just in their native community, click "See permissions for native community only".

Here are the results of showing your own member information:

Here are the results of showing another member's information:

• The list of eRooms the member belongs to, per community.

• The list of Groups the member belongs to.

Modifying member information

Your ability to modify member information depends on your role, the permissions you have, and the site and community options in effect. Member information tasks and corresponding requirements are summarized in the table below.

Note: Changing a member's permissions on a Member Information page adds or removes the member to or from the corresponding permission group in the corresponding community. The reverse is also true (changing group membership modifies member information).

Member groups

eRoom groups collect multiple members into a logical set so they can be referred to indirectly. Groups exist in the context of communities. Administrators and members with Can create groups or Can modify the community member list permission can create eRoom groups.

User-defined and built-in groups

Groups can be user-defined to collect members according to organizational or functional lines, for example. Suppose you create a group for the Sales team, and then add the "Sales" group as a member of all sales-related eRooms. By adding each new sales person to the "Sales" group, he or she becomes a member of all sales-related eRooms. Names of user-defined groups must be unique only in the community in which they are created.

eRoom also collects members in groups according to the kind of permissions they have, and the kind of community membership they have. These are called built-in groups because eRoom automatically creates them. Names of built-in groups do not conflict with names of other groups in the same community. There are two kinds of built-in eRoom groups: permission groups and non-permission groups.

Permission groups

Permission groups grant specific permissions to members of those groups. Only site administrators can modify the "Site Administrators" group, but site and community administrators can modify all of the others.

Note: The SecurID built-in group is a site-wide permission group for specifying members who must log in using RSA SecurID®. This group is only accessible via the site member list.

Non-permission groups

Non-permission groups collect members according to their type of community membership.

Group properties

In addition to the members a group has, a group also has properties that include its name, an Edit list of who can modify its member list and properties, and which permissions its members have. Depending on your role and permissions, you can edit these properties for user-defined groups. For non-permission groups, you can edit their permissions just as you can for other members. None of the properties of permission groups, however, are editable.  

Member lists

At each level of an eRoom site, members and groups are organized into member lists.

See also: Working with member lists for information about how eRoom displays member lists, how you can adjust the display of information in member lists, and how you can find members in large member lists.

Member list information

In member lists other than member pickers, symbols in columns to the left of member names (individuals and groups) are as follows:

Information for members is as follows:

Note: Depending on the member field customization settings in Site Settings, the following fields might also be shown in member lists: login name, email, and other info (possibly renamed).

Working with member lists

You can change the order of entries on the Members page by clicking a column title to sort entries in ascending or descending order according to the values in that column.

In community and eRoom member lists, groups (or in eRoom member lists, groups and roles) and individual members are listed in separate sections that you can expand or collapse.

In eRoom member lists and group member lists, you can view the list as either a flat list that shows all members including members of groups (the name of each group appears in the "via group" column), or as a hierarchical list that only shows explicit list members (that is, members not part of a group). In a hierarchical view, you can see group members in the group lists. To switch from a flat to hierarchical member list view, click "hide via group members". To reverse this switch, click "show via group members".

See also:

• Managing eRoom membership in the Coordinating an eRoom topic

• Managing community membership

• Managing community guest membership

• Managing members as site administrator

Large member lists

Many organizations use NT Domain or LDAP directories to manage thousands of user accounts. Since eRoom integrates with these directories, eRoom member lists can also be very large. When member lists reach a certain size, eRoom provides more streamlined ways to navigate them -- by constructing "Rolodextm-style" tabbed pages and a search form, or for the largest lists, just a search form. eRoom provides two incremental threshold numbers (specified in Site Settings) above which the member lists become increasingly compact so you can navigate them more efficiently:

• When a member list reaches a specified size between (the initial threshold is 500, but can be changed in Site Settings), eRoom divides the list into Rolodex-style tabbed pages and provides a search form that you can show or hide.  
  
  Tabbed pages are grouped by last name (alphabetically or according to customized tabs defined in Site Settings), plus a page for "Other" members and a page for "Groups". To navigate between tabbed pages, click the tab labels along the top of the page.

• When a member list reaches a specified size between 250 and 20,000 members (the initial threshold is 10,000, but can be changed in Site Settings), eRoom shows just a search form. For these largest lists, you cannot hide the search form.

• For all large member lists, the search form has a "more options" button you can click to show more search fields.

Members per page limit

When a member list page has more than 500 members (the initial limit, which can be changed in Site Settings), eRoom divides it into tabbed sub-pages. The tabs are labeled with characters distinguishing the names of the first and last members on each sub-page.

The tab labels have the form Name1-Name2, where Name1 and Name2 are the distinguished names of the first and last members on the page, separated by a hyphen. For example, if the last name of the first member on the first page is Aarons, and the last name of the last member is Adkins, the tab for the first page shows Aar-Adk. If the last name of the last member on the first page is Adams, and the last name of the first member on the second page is Adamson, then the tab for the first page shows Aar-Adams, and the tab for page two shows Adamso-Atk.

To navigate between tabbed sub-pages, click the corresponding links at the bottom or top of each page.

Second-level tabs for groups are constructed the same way as for members, except that built-in groups have their own tab, which always appears first. This tab always shows all built-in groups, even if there are more than the per-page maximum of 500. The groups are initially sorted alphabetically by group name, with a secondary sort by community name.

Searching large member lists

Use the member search form to filter a large member list to show just those members or groups that match your criteria.

To search for and select members or groups in large member lists:

1. If present, click "show search" in the button bar at the top of a large member list (or a member picker, such as when you delete members or send an alert). For the largest lists, the search form is always displayed.

2. In the simple search form, pick Last name to locate a member by last name, or Groups (in a community or site) or Groups/Roles (in an eRoom) to find particular groups or roles.
   
   Or, in the expanded search form, which is shown when you click "more options" on the abbreviated form, specify search criteria as follows:

• Pick People to search for individual members. Use any combination of the following search fields: Display name, First name, Last name, and Organization. Depending on the member field customization settings in Site Settings, the following fields might also be available as search criteria: Login name, Email, and Other info (possibly renamed). To narrow your People search to specific built-in roles, you can pick from the "Which members?" drop-down list one of the following: All, Coordinators, Participants, Observers.

• Pick Groups (in a community or site) or Groups/Roles (in an eRoom) to search for particular groups or custom roles.

3. Type as much or as little search criteria as appropriate to filter the member list. The more criteria you specify, the narrower the search, and the fewer the results.

• In the text boxes, you can use the asterisk (*) wildcard character at the end of a string to specify "any following character".

• The asterisk is implicit when you type a partial name string. For example, if you type "A" in the "Last name" box, you find all members with a last name beginning with "A" (such as Abbott, Ackerman, and Ahearn). If you type "Ad", the search finds members with last names like Adams, Adelmann, Adolphson, and so on.

• If the Login name or Email fields are available in the search form, you can specify multiple values in their text boxes. Just separate the values with semicolons (;).

4. Once you specify your criteria, click "Find" to filter the member list or member picker.
   
   eRoom lists only the members who match your criteria. In a member list, click a member's name to display their member information; click the name of a group to display its constituent members.

5. To act on members in a member picker, select their check boxes.
   
   As you navigate multiple pages in a member picker (complete or filtered), eRoom keeps a list of the members you select in a "Selected Members" area at the bottom of the page. Your member selections are persistent throughout the list.

6. To select all members on all tabs, click "Select All".

Note: Member search results are capped at 5,000. If your search produces more than 5,000 results, specify more search criteria to narrow the results. If there are fewer than 5,000 results, eRoom divides the results onto sub-pages, using the lower of the two large member list thresholds to determine the number of members per page. Instead of the Rolodex-style tabs, eRoom constructs tabs for search results sub-pages using the form Name1-Name2, as described above. In the results for searches for groups, eRoom shows built-in groups first, sorted alphabetically by group name, followed by member groups, sorted alphabetically be group name.

Managing community membership

Membership is managed at the community level (adding/deleting members and groups, adding/deleting directory connections, and adding/deleting guests). Your ability to modify community membership depends on your role, the permissions you have, and the community options in effect. These actions and requirements are summarized here.

Managing local members and groups

All members must have passwords in order to log in to the site. You can create new local members with or without passwords, depending on the site setting for who can create members' initial passwords.

• When members' initial passwords are supplied by their creator, one at a time, you must supply a password for each new member you create.   

• When members' initial passwords are supplied by their creator or the members, with batch creation available, and you create members one at a time, you can decide whether to set their passwords at creation time, or let each member choose their own. Members without creator-supplied initial passwords must either have an administrator set their passwords so they can log in, or receive an invitation to an eRoom, which allows them to set their passwords and log in.

• When members' initial passwords are supplied by their creator or the members, with batch creation available, and you create multiple members at once (batch creation), you cannot set their passwords at creation time. In this case, you can either invite such members to the site at creation time, have an administrator set their passwords so they can log in, or add the new members to eRooms and invite them from there.

See also:

• Password recovery for information about how local members can pick a personal question and supply an answer so that eRoom can help them recover forgotten passwords in the future.

• Password rules for local members for information about settings that determine whether local members at your site can or must change their passwords (and how often).

To create new local members, one at a time:

1. Open the community member list and click "new member".
   
   Or, from a community-level member picker, such as the Choose Members page when you are adding members to a group, click "new member".
   
   The Member Information page opens.

2. If member creators must supply initial passwords for new members at your site, enter a password (twice to verify).
   
   Or, if member creators or the members themselves can supply initial passwords at your site, the password boxes are preceded by the option to "let the member choose their own password (requires invitation)".

• If you leave this check box selected, you cannot enter a password in the boxes.

• If you clear this check box, you must enter a password in the boxes.

3. Complete the Member Information page and click "OK" or "Add Another" for each new member.
   
   When you return to the community member list or the community-level member picker, the newly created members are listed in the usual way.

• Newly created members without passwords must be added to an eRoom (by a coordinator or administrator) and invited there so they can set their passwords and log in.

• Newly created members with passwords can log in to the site and go to their My eRooms page, or to any eRoom to which they belong (no invitation required).

 To create a batch of new local members:

1. Open the community member list and click "new members...".
   
   Or, from a community-level member picker, such as the Choose Members page when you are adding members to a group, click "new members...".
   
   The "New Members, step 1 of 2" page opens.

2. Specify an email address for each new member you want to create, and click "Next".

3. On the "New Members, step 2 of 2" page of the wizard, edit any of these values for each member (default values are taken from the email addresses you enter in the first step):

• Email address

• Login name

• Display name

• First name

• Middle name

• Last name

• Initials

4. On the Confirmation page, decide if you want to send invitations to the site now, or wait until members are added to an eRoom and invited from there.

• If you opt to send invitations to all of the new members at once, they receive email invitations to the site. In this case, when they click the invitation link, they can log in, set their passwords, and go to their My eRooms page, where there might be links to eRooms to which they've already been added.

• If you opt to send invitations later, each new member must be added to an eRoom, and then sent an invitation. In this case, when they click the invitation link, they can log in and set their passwords before going to their eRoom.

5. If you send invitations now, you see the "Message Sent" page. Otherwise, you return to the community member list or the community-level member picker, where the newly created members are listed in the usual way.

To create new local groups:

1. Open the community member list, and click "new group". (If you have "Can create groups" permission, but are not an administrator or coordinator, you can open the community member list from your My eRooms page.)
   
   Or, if you are adding members to a group, you can click "New Group" on the Choose Members page.

2. Type a name for the new group and click "OK".

3. On the Members of the Group page (which is initially empty for a new group), click "add" to open the Choose Members page.

4. Either search for or pick the members you want in the group.
   
   When you are populating a group, and you create a new group from the Choose Members page, that newest group is initially empty. You can still add the empty group to the group you are populating. Just add members to the empty group later.

5. Click "OK" when you are finished adding members.
   
   Repeat these steps for each new group you want to create.

See also: To create a new group and add it as a member to your eRoom for how an eRoom coordinator with the "Can modify the community member list" permission can create a new group in the course of adding members to the eRoom.

To delete local members or groups:

1. Open the community member list, and click "delete" to open the Choose Members page (the community member picker), which lists all local members and groups, including guests. 

2. Either search for or pick the members or groups you want to remove.
   
   Or, to delete all local members and groups, on the Choose Members page, click "Delete All".
   
   Before eRoom removes the members or groups, you must click "OK" to confirm the deletions. When you do, eRoom updates the member list accordingly.

Note: In the community member list, you can click the delete icon () next to the name of the member or group that you want to remove from the member list.

To add or remove local group members:

1. Open the community member list, and click the name of the group whose membership you want to modify.  

2. On the group's Members page, click "add" or "remove" to open the Choose Members page.

3. Either search for or pick the members or groups you want to add to or remove from the group, and then click "OK".
   
   (Before removing members or groups from a group, eRoom asks you to confirm their removal.)

Note: On the group Members page, you can click the delete icon () next to the name of the member or group that you want to remove from the group's membership.

To edit local group membership or properties:

1. Open the community member list, and click the name of the group whose membership or properties you want to modify.

2. On the group Members page, click .

3. On the Edit Group page, modify properties as appropriate.

The properties of a group are as follows:

Managing community guest membership

Site members can belong to multiple communities, each having just one home community. Membership in other communities is guest membership. You can manage guest membership in communities according to your role and permissions, as well as the privacy status of each community (public, private, restricted). Guest membership tasks are summarized here:

To add guests:

Open the community member list and click "add a guest".

• If there is more than one other public community in the site, the Choose a Community page opens.

• To locate guests from a particular community, pick a community name from the list and click "OK". The community's member list opens from which you can pick members.

• To locate a particular site member, click "Add Guest By Name". On the "Add a Guest by Name" page type the member's login name (not display name, as in first or last name) and click "OK". If eRoom finds a site member matching the specified login name, click "OK" to add the member as a guest.

• If there is only one other public community, its member list opens from which you can pick members.

• If there is only one other public community but at least one other restricted community, the Choose a Community page opens. You can either click "OK" to pick the public community, or click "Add Guest By Name" to locate a particular member in a restricted community.

• If there are no other public or restricted communities, you cannot add guests unless you are a site administrator.

To remove guests:

You remove guests the same way you delete local members and groups.

Managing members as site administrator

As site administrator, you can move local community members and groups (not members brought in via directory connections), and merge duplicate accounts.

To move local members from one community to another:

1. Open the community member list and click "move members".

2. On the Choose Members page (the community member picker), which lists all local members and groups (including guests), either search for or pick the members or groups you want to move.
   
   Or, to select all local members and groups, on the Choose Members page, click "Select All".

3. Click "Next".

4. On the Choose Community page, pick the community to which you want to move the selected members.

5. Click "Next", and confirm that you want to move the selected members to the selected community.

6. If there are any group-name conflicts, decide whether to Stop the move or to Have eRoom make the names unique. If you go ahead with the move, when you click "OK", eRoom renames the moved groups in order to make them unique by adding "_n" (where n is a numeral) to each group name that matches a group name in the new community.

When you move members/groups

• eRoom removes the selected members from the member list of the current community and adds them to the member list of the selected community. All reference to the members community are changed to refer to the new community.

• If a moved group references a built-in group (directly or indirectly), the members are moved, but the built-in groups themselves and the references are not moved to the new community. Permissions are not moved with members/groups to the new community.
  
  For example: The "Managers" group, in community A, contains the "can modify the member list" permission group. You move the "Managers" group to community B. Members of the "can modify the member list" permission group, but not the group itself, move with the "Managers" group to community B, but they no longer have the "can modify the member list" permission.

• Moved guests become native members of the new community.

• Members of groups are moved to the new community with their groups.

• If you move a directory group, the directory is disconnected from the current community and reconnected in the new community.

After the move, you return to the community member list page you started from.

To merge duplicate member accounts:

1. Open the site member list and click "merge members".
   
   The Choose Members page opens, which lists all duplicate accounts (individual members only), including deleted members and members from deleted communities and directory connections.

2. Pick two or more accounts you want to merge, including the account into which you want to merge all the accounts, and click "Next".
   
   The Choose Members page opens and displays the members you selected.

3. From the list of members you selected, pick the account into which you want to merge all the selected accounts. This account will become the "surviving" member.

4. Click "Next".

5. On the Merge member page, confirm that all the listed accounts will be purged from the site and merged with the surviving member you picked.

When you merge two or more accounts

• eRoom discards the duplicates' login information (login name, email address, password) while preserving only the merged account's information.

• Any group, eRoom, or community that referenced any of the duplicates now references the remaining, merged account.

• The merged account

• becomes a guest of the duplicates' native communities, if it is not one already

• takes on the duplicates' access privileges (if any) to eRoom items  

• takes on the roles and permissions of the duplicates

• The duplicates are permanently deleted from the site member list, and are no longer available for merging.