How to Manage User Accounts
The Users tab allows you to manage users individually or conduct batch user creation and deletion.
To view the users that are administered by your organisation select 'Organisations Users List' from the 'Users' drop down menu.
The 'Edit' button on the right of the list lets you edit the users details including resetting their passwords. The 'Delete' button removes their iSee account.
In the example below there is only one registered user in the organisation. Note the Edit and Delete buttons as well as the ability to export the user list to an Excel file.
Searching for users
The search filters in each of the fields allow you to search for individual or groups of users. Typing something into any of the search fields at the top of the list columns automatically carries out a 'Contains' search - where the results are any records that contain the search term.
Clicking on the funnel icon beside the search field allows for other kinds of searches such as 'Does not contain' or 'Is equal to' (see below).
Using these search features it is possible to search for an individual user or for a collection of users. For example, if your organisations included a student population and a staff population that had a different email domain, you could search for just students or staff by filtering based on the 'Contains' @xxxx.xxx email domain name.
Adding an individual user to your organisation
To add an individual user first select 'Organisations User List' from the 'Users' drop down menu (as above), then click the '+ Add new record' button. This will open up a window to enter in the new users details.
Both the Username and Email must be unique for each user, so a good convention is to use the persons email address for both fields as all email address are unique. If you want to create multiple accounts for a user you will need to use a different email address for each account.
The 'Display Name' is the name that will be presented on their video avatar in the iSee client. To promote an environment for authentic relationship building a good convention is to use their Firstname Lastname in this field. The user can edit this later at any time during the iSee login process.
Click the 'Is Active' checkbox to make the user active.
Click the 'Is Private' checkbox if you want the persons username to only be available to your organisation. There are some advantages in leaving this box unchecked if they are likely to participate in a number of different organisations.
Click 'Update' to create the new user account - this may take a few seconds. If you click the 'Update' button again while the account is being created you will see a Fail message saying that either the Username or Email are not unique. This could be because you have already clicked the 'Update' button and the account has already been successfully created. You can check this by seeing if the top row of the user list in the darkened background view is the new user that you have just added (see example below).
Batch user creation
To add a larger number of users it is usually more efficient to use the batch user creation system.
To use the batch user creation system download the Excel batch user creation template here - and follow the instructions to populate it with user data from your database. All fields are required and note the recommendation to use the persons email as the username. This is because the username must be unique in the system and all email addresses are unique by definition.
Setting the 'Private' column to '0' will allow other organisations to see the persons username and add them to sessions which can be useful if you think the person is likely to have iSee accounts with other institutions or are likely to participate in cross institutional activities. If you do not want the persons details to be available to other institutions then set this value to '1'.
Copy the values in each column, excluding the header, to a fresh spreadsheet.
Save the fresh spreadsheeet in .csv format for uploading.
After creating your batch upload file, choose 'Batch Organisations Users Creation' from the 'Users' pull down menu to open the file upload screen.
Click on the 'Select files...' button (see below) and select your saved .csv file.
Having the 'Send Welcome Email' button checked will send the automated welcome email below to each person in the batch upload. Most organisations will want to leave this box unchecked and send their own custom email with information.
Once the file has been selected and a decision has been made on sending the automated email, click on 'Submit' button to complete the batch upload.
Batch user deletion
To batch delete users from your organisation all you need is a simple list of usernames in a .csv file.
If you have used email addresses as usernames then you may already have a username list for the accounts in your organisations database. If you do not have an easily generated list of accounts you may want to start by downloading your organisations user list. To do this go to the 'Organisations Users List' from the 'Users' pull down menu and click on the 'Export To Excel' button to download the list as a .csv file.
Once you have your user list file you can open it in Excel for editing. Remove any users from the list that you want to remain in the organisation i.e. any name left on the list will be deleted. Save your edited file and then upload to it to the portal using the 'Batch Organisations Users Deletion' from the 'Users' pull down menu.