User profiles provide information about users, such as address, position, or whatever other information you want. User profiles can be accessed from several different contexts, but are always available to end users as a series of portlets accessible through My Account | View User Profile.
There are several features associated with controlling and populating user profiles:
You can change the portlets displayed on the user
profile pages through the User
Profile Manager. Some user profile portlets are created upon installation
(General Information, Folder Expertise, and Managed Communities), but
you can also create new portlets to suit your needs. To learn how to create
new user profile portlets, refer to the instructions at the bottom of
User Profile Portlet
Configuration.
Note: If you copy a user profile portlet, both the copy and
the original portlet will share the same administrative preferences. Changing
the preferences in one portlet changes the preferences for the other one
as well. If you want each portlet to have independent administrative preferences,
create a new user profile portlet from the same Web service.
You can change the properties displayed in the user profile portlets through the administrative preferences page of the user profile portlet (accessible through the Main Settings page of the Portlet Editor). For information on these administrative preferences, see User Profile Portlet Configuration.
The values for properties in the user profile
are either manually entered by the user on the Edit
User Profile page or automatically populated by a profile
Web service.
Note: The Folder Expertise portlet displays the list of folders
for which the user is an expert. You can add users to a folder as an expert
through the Related Resources
page of the Folder Editor, or, if users have the Self-Selected Experts
activity right, they can add themselves as experts when they are browsing
folders in the Directory. The Managed Communities portlet displays
the list of communities managed by the user. This portlet is automatically
populated with all the communities to which the user has Edit or Admin
access.
You can limit the information displayed in user profiles by restricting access to the user profile portlets and the properties displayed in those portlets. For example, you might want to display employee contact information both to customers and employees but want to restrict reporting hierarchy information to display only to employees. You could create two separate user profile portlets—one for your customers (containing the contact information properties) and another one for your employees (containing the contact information and reporting hierarchy properties). However, you could instead just create one user profile portlet, containing the contact information and reporting hierarchy properties, but limit the security on the reporting hierarchy properties to allow only employees Select access. Users that have Select access to a property can view the value of that property for other users. Users who have Read access to a property can view only their own values; when they view the profile of another user, that property is hidden.
User profile portlets are made up of:
Properties: Profile
information—such as name, author, and title—are stored with users as properties.
These properties, like those associated with any other type of object—such
as content crawlers and documents—can be searched (if they are set as
searchable in the Property Editor).
Just as with other objects, a property of a user has the same value
regardless of where it is displayed. For example, if you want to display
your users' home phone numbers in a Home Information Profile portlet and
their work phone numbers in a Work Information Profile portlet, you must
create separate "Work Phone" and "Home Phone" properties
and display them in the respective portlets. If you only have a single
"Phone" property, then the value of the Phone property would
be the same in both profile portlets.
Categories: Categories are organized groups of properties. Categories let you organize the display order of properties and provide context for what type of information is being displayed.