One of the first questions we get from the people testing our software is if they have to introduce users manually. Setting up Quandora according to your company’s needs is a first and very important step as it can considerably influence users adoption. That’s why we prepared this blog post on the subject.
The easiest way to define the audience in Quandora is to specify one or more login domains. Thus, a Quandora site for, let’s say, PivotalLabs employees would set up the login domain to “pivotallabs.com“. Or IBM could set up “ibm.com” but maybe also “ibm-france.com“, etc.
By doing that, Quandora will allow any user with an email address fitting the setting to log in and use Quandora. The actual account is created at the first log in. So setting up the login domain doesn’t automatically create all the accounts (although, we do offer this feature for Google Apps through a synchronising option), but authorises them for when the user actually come to Quandora for the first time.
However, in case Quandora is to be used not for an internal organisation, but for an inter-organization network, then specifying login domains is no longer appropriate and the accounts have to be manually approved by the administrator. Unless the network in question is already defined as a Yammer network. In this case, we offer the possibility of specifying the Yammer network in Quandora, and the users from this network will be automatically accepted in Quandora (pretty much on the model of the allowed domains – only the Yammer network is used to verify against). Later edit: Now you can link a knowledge base to a specific Yammer group as well as other external bindings like Hipchat or Campfire rooms.
Regardless of the way the audience is defined (login domain, Yammer network, or manual validation), users can use various third party accounts to log in: Google, Yammer, SalesForce, Github, Facebook… and more to come. It’s the administrator’s choice which of those external account providers are enabled.
Going back to the initial question, about how to bring the target audience to Quandora without manual account creation, the answer is:
- first set up the right access policy, as explained above (note, the access policy is configured automatically when signing up for Quandora, based on the user’s email address and his third party service profile, and usually those settings are the right ones)
- then provide the link to the target audience somehow. One option is sending the link a mailing list, if there is one. Another is posting it on Yammer, for Yammer users (and actually, this happens automatically when Quandora is first installed). Another is to use Quandora itself, concretely the Invite users option. It supports copy/paste-ing a list of coma separated email addresses.
Basically, any existing communication mechanism in place, reaching to the audience, will do. All they need to know is the URL. If the access policy is correctly configured, the accounts will be transparently created the moment the user log in for the first time.
In the future, we plan to add additional ways to specify the allowed audience, such as Facebook or LinkedIn groups.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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