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Throughout our diverse Linchpin apps you'll encounter a concept called personalization. This means, that contents are delivered to a user based on the user's profile data. This is commonly used on dashboards: Employees from department A will see different news than employees from department B, although they look at the same spot on their dashboard.
You can also use this concept of personalization for Linchpin Touch.
Simple example: You have a "What's for lunch" item in your footer. But you'll run Linchpin Touch on different displays throughout your company, and not all of them share the same canteen. So how do you show your employees the right lunch options for every location? The answer is: Personalization.
How to differentiate between boards?
On each Touch Device you log in with a special user, created for this purpose only. But instead of creating just one "board user", you can create as many as you have locations. "board user Frankfurt" will then have a profile field set to Frankfurt, "board user Washington" will have the same profile field set to Washington.
Now, you can configure the "What's for lunch" item in a way that shows the right content to each of those users: the Frankfurt lunch menu for "board user Frankfurt", the Washington lunch menu for "board user Washington".
You can create as many users as you need, in the extreme it would be one user per device. But if you don't need those differentiations, if all the content can be the same on all devices, one user will suffice.
Older systems: This functionality is available as soon as you have installed the additional Linchpin Manager app with a valid license.
Up-To-Date systems: This functionality is available if you use the Linchpin Intranet Suite. We removed the Linchpin Manager app in version 1.6 (Suite version 3.3).
Defining personalization groups
First, you need to define the profile fields that will be relevant for your personalization. The dropdown menu offers all available profile fields, standard Confluence fields as well as those configured with the Linchpin User Profiles app.
Save your selection by clicking the button.
In a second step you define several personalization groups. In this example, lets assume that you have three plants, one in Paris, one in Frankfurt, one in Washington. In order to always show the correct "what's for lunch" contents, you want to personalize based on the profile field "Branch (confluence.location)".
In our example we created three groups, one for each plan.
Additionally, you want to show selected contents to visitors in publicly accessible areas of your company buildings. For this, you need another group, which we called Visitors in this example. We also made sure to create a board user who has "visiting" set as location in its profile field.
These personalization groups are not the same as Confluence user groups!
Confluence user groups consist of users that are specifically assigned as part of that group. Confluence user groups can be used for a variety of things, like granting permissions to access or editing contents.
Personalization groups create groups of users that share a specific set of profile values. These personalization groups do nothing else but help personalize contents in Linchpin Touch. For the future, we plan to make the personalization groups available to all Linchpin apps, so you can use them throughout the Linchpin suite.
Personalized Sidebar / Footer
There're two levels of personalization in your sidebar and footer. It works completely the same for sidebars and footers.
- You can have one sidebar/footer for all board users and only personalize certain elements.
- You can have different sidebars/footers for different board users.
When to you use what?
Let's stay with our example:
Your company plans to put up touch devices at the three plants, one in Paris, one in Frankfurt, one in Washington. You want to show the same contents on all of those screens: Company figures, news, general information, etc. But in your footer you want to have a menu item called "lunch". Quite probably your three plans don't share the same catering, so there'll be three pages in your Confluence: one showing the lunch options for Paris, one for Frankfurt, one for Washington.
In this case you'll go with option one: one footer for all of them, but inside this footer there's one menu item that's personalized.
When to go with option 2?
Besides those touch devices in your three plants, you will also have a screen in your main visitors area. There, you want visitors waiting for their appointment to be able to browse through selected contents suitable for external visitors.
In this case you'll probably have hugely different menus for sidebar and footer for your visitors and not the same you show to employees. That's when you go for option 2.
Please note: Option 1 is the default. Only go for option 2, if the menus differ from each other very much or completely
Click here to find out more about the sidebar and footer navigation!
Edit the sidebar as described in this documentation. We assume you have three Confluence pages, each one containing the lunch options for either Washington, Frankfurt or Paris.
For the personalization you'll add three menu items called "Lunch". In each menu item you select one of those three Confluence pages for a link. Then you configure the field "visible for". In this field, you select the appropriate personalization group for your content: the Washington group for the Washington lunch options, and so on.
If you look at your touch display and you have one of these locations in the logged in user's profile, you'll see the appropriate lunch options. If the logged in user has another location in his field, or none at all, he won't see any menu item named lunch at all.
Simply click the button "New Sidebar" or "New Footer". Next to the name of the sidebar, you can assign one or several of your personalization groups.
Configure your sidebar or footer as described in the corresponding part of this documentation.
Technically it's possible that one user fits the criteria for two or more personalization groups. If this is the case, this user will not see several sidebar or footer menus. Instead this user will see the first applicable menu out of the list. That's why you can order the sidebars and footers.
This is especially important if you have fallback menus. Let's say, you defined one special sidebar menu for a certain personalization group. For all other users you define another, more generic sidebar menu. Because you want this to be shown for all other users, you don't assign a personalization group but leave the field empty. If this generic sidebar sits on top of the list, it will be shown for all users - including those that belong to your special personalization group. In this case you would want to have the specially assigned sidebar on top, the generic "fallback for everyone else" below.
Simply organize your sidebars and footers with drag&drop.
Safety Guidelines
We strongly recommend the following Confluence configuration settings to avoid potential security risks:
Make sure people are not allowed to register their own accounts, especially without restriction to your domain.
If you allow anonymous access, make sure anonymous users don't have permission to create or edit anything anywhere (pages, blogposts, comments, attachments etc. in any space).
If you configure your instance differently, you do so at your own risk.
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