Installation

Installing the Plugin

The plugin is available at the Atlassian Marketplace. To install the plugin, log in as a system administrator and navigate to the add-on management in the administration console (choose Cog icon > Add-ons at top right of the screen or for older systems Browse > Confluence Admin > Plugins). In the menu on the left click the “Find New Add-ons” link (On older systems you have to enter the Plugins section and navigate to the “Install”-Tab.). Search for “user profiles for confluence” to display our add-on “User Profiles for Confluence”. Click the Buy Now or Free Trial button to install the add-on.

If the installation was successful, a new section should appear on the left-hand panel in the administration console: “User Profiles for Confluence”. This is where the customization of the user profiles takes place. If this section is not visible, please ensure that all required modules of the plugin are enabled. For this you should select the “User Profiles for Confluence” from the list of installed add-ons. Of the listed, modules only the modules named “profile” are not required for the plugin to work. Each other module should be enabled.

exchanging_profile

Exchanging Profile Macros

Background-Knowledge: The profile-Macro (which is a part of the bundled plugin “Profile Macros”) is required to display user data at the people directory, the hover for users and at the personal space. User Profiles for Confluence provides its own version of this macro. This version behaves like the one from “Profile Macros”, but displays additional created user profile elements too. To benefit from all features of User Profiles for Confluence the macros should be exchanged.

Please note

It is important, that you keep the order of the steps, meaning first disable the standard profile macro and afterwards enable the User Profile macros!

Disable the “profile” macro module of the “Profile Macros” Plugin

Open the old plugin administration view via http://<server base url>/admin/viewplugins.action
Select the “Profile Macros” plugin and disable the “profile” macro module

Enable the “profile” macro module of “User Profiles for Confluence”

Switch to the default plugin administration, via Cog icon > Add-ons at top right of the screen or for older systems Browse > Confluence Admin > Plugins
- Select the “User Profiles for Confluence”
- Activate both macros with the name “profile” (click “Enable” on the modules “profile”)

Licensing

The plugin needs a valid license to have all the provided features working. Valid licenses are either full licenses, renewal licenses, or 30-day trials and are available at the Atlassian Marketplace. The license model is the same as Atlassian uses for its products – for further information see Atlassians docmentation.

To get a license and provide it for the plugin, please carry out the following instructions, (also see the screenshot below):

Go to the license settings page (Administration Console > Plugins > Tab “Manage my plugins” or simular tab > Extend “User Profiles for Confluence”)
Use the links to create a new license at the Atlassian Marketplace (use “Free Try” to get a new trial license or “Buy Now” to purchase a full license), or copy a license you got from Communardo.
Enter the license key in the license screen.

Workaround (if one of the steps above does not work or is not available – this may happen with older Confluence versions)

Create licenses with the links that are available in the Atlassian Marketplace
Enter the license in the configuration screen of the plugin into the section “License Administration”. The configuration screen is available via the link User Profiles for Confluence > License in the panel on the left side of the administration console (choose Cog icon > Confluence Admin at top right of the screen or for older systems Browse > Confluence Admin).

Without a valid license, the user profiles shows the message “Plugin is not licensed” instead of the user profile data.

Configuration

Several Configurations can be made, that are listed below ...

User Profile Elements

Configuration Overview

You can access the configuration via the menu item User Profiles for Confluence > Profile Elements in the panel on the left side of the administration console (choose Cog icon > Confluence Admin at top right of the screen or for older systems Browse > Confluence Admin).

The configuration page allows you to add new elements for user profiles or to edit existing elements. This includes standard elements of the user profiles. The standard elements “Full Name” and “Email” cannot be manipulated in order to protect important system functionalities, therefore they are not available in the configuration. Additional elements are placed at the end of the sections “Personal” and “Company”. You can change the order of the fields by clicking the arrows (↑ ↓). With one click you move the profile element one position up or down.

The section “Special Elements” contains the “About Me“ and you can configure a synchronization of user pictures in this section (A more detailed description for this, you will find below in the documentation.).

Please note: You cannot change the order of the items of “Special Elements”, because “About Me“ is never displayed as part of the profile card and the profile picture has a fix position within the profile.

This configuration that you perform here will be used for all user profiles in the system.

Configuration of Elements – Add and Edit

Click on the “Edit” or “Add Element” button to edit an existing item, or insert a new one.

The configuration page of an element allows you to create/edit an element of the user profile.

Title for this Element

A default title (“Title (Default)” and “Title (German)”) for the element can be defined. The information for “Title (Default)” is mandatory. The Default and German Title can only be edited for additional profile elements and not for standard elements.

Help Text for this Element

Additionally, you can define help texts to support the users in filling this element in their user profile.

Field Type Configuration

The “Field Type” of the element determines the kind of element:
- Textfield: A simple text field
- Textarea: This is convenient for elements which might carry longer texts (like the “About Me” element) since it renders wiki markup too.
- Userfield: Carry a username and supports auto complete while editing a user profile. On the rendered page, you have the typical mouseover popup for this user profile.
- Textfield with Autocomplete: Here you can type in any text you want. Additionally while you edit this, the system suggests values that other users entered in this field before. User Profiles for Confluence suggests values that start with the same letter(s) that you already entered. This auto completion is also available for several values if they are separated by commas.
- Single Select (Radiobuttons): Allows the configuration of predefined options. The user can select their profile information from one of these options.
- Multiple Select (Checkboxes): Allows the configuration of predefined options. The user can select their profile information from more than one of these options.
Special feature for “User Field”. If this field type is selected, an additional check box “The field value is a DN reference to the user.” appears. You can enable this check box to define that the user name in the user directory is a distinguished name.
For the synchronization to work, you have to provide a mapping of LDAP attributes to standard or additional user profile elements. It is possible to relate more than one LDAP attribute to one user profile element. The mapping has to be provided at “Mapping for LDAP Attribute(s)” by using the following syntax:
- Any LDAP attribute has to be given as %%LDAP_ATTRIBUTE%% (i.e. name of an LDAP attribute enclosed in two percent signs (%%)).
- Multiple LDAP attributes with the same name are supported. If there are such attributes they will be mapped to the same profile field, separated by comma.
- You can also specify static text (e.g. %%street%% %%number%% in %%city%%)
- Use %%upp_delete_value%% as a placeholder to delete the data for previously synchronized profile element.

Visibility

The check box “Display in People Directory and Custom Mode”defines if the element will be shown in user profiles, hover cards or profile lists displayed with the display mode ‘custom’
- This only works if you enabled the profile macros, as described in “Exchanging Profile Macros”.
- This is not possible for the “About Me” field

Configuration of Elements – Hide and Delete

Click on the “Hide” (default elements) or “Delete” (additional elements) button to hide an item, or delete one.

Existing additional profile elements can be deleted via the button “Delete”. Standard Elements can only be hidden via “Hide”.

The data for hidden elements stays stored as long as the element is hidden and is displayed again after clicking “Show”.
When a previously added profile element is deleted, all the data belonging to this element is purged as well for each user.
Hiding standard profile elements only works if the profile-Macro had been exchanged.

Additional Notes

Users cannot edit synchronized profile elements. An element is considered “synchronized”, if the field “Mapping for LDAP Attribute(s)” in the customization form is not empty, even if the value of the mapped LDAP attribute is empty. This restriction only applies to users who are synchronized via LDAP. Local users can edit each profile element.
Unknown LDAP attributes are recognized during synchronization and will be ignored. They are listed after each manual synchronization and produce a warning in the logs.
For the data of the user profiles to be updated, a synchronization has to run first. See the next section on how this can be achieved.
Though supported, it’s recommended not to create more than 15 to 20 additional user profile elements.
Fields of the type “Textfield with Autocomplete”, “Single Select” and “Multiple Select” will not be synchronized.
While editing a profile element, only some of the field types can be selected. For fields of some types it is not possible to change the type at all. This is because data stored for fields of a specific type can't be migrated automatically into data for fields of every other type. E.g. data stored for fields of type “Multiple Select” is totally different from data stored for all other fields and so the type of such elements can’t be changed. The following modifications are possible:
- Textfield ↔ Textarea ↔ Textfield with Autocomplete
- Userfield (no change possible)
- Checkbox (no change possible)
- Radiobutton (no change possible)

Demo of user profile configuration (If you can not see embedded video below, please check whether you have agreed to the privacy policy of this website or if your browser blocks unsafe content.)

BLOCK

Synchronize User Profile Pictures

With version 1.10 of the add-on, the synchronization of user pictures is supported from a central storage. You can find the configuration under “Special Elements” in the settings of User Profiles for Confluence (Administration Console > User Profiles for Confluence > Profile Elements).

To synchronize user pictures from a central user directory you have to enter the attribute name where the picture is stored. The name of the attribute is typically “thumbnailPhoto” for Active Directory and “jpegPhoto” for OpenLDAP. You may set multiple attributes separated by a comma, i.e. “thumbnailPhoto,jpegPhoto”. This is useful, if you have configured multiple directories of different types.

The synchronization is based on the following features

While the synchronization process is running a picture of a user is read out, cropped to a square format and if necessary scaled-down.
Pictures are stored in the size 96 x 96 if the original is in a sufficient resolution. Otherwise the picture is stored in 48 x 48.
If a picture is updated in the picture storage, while the next synchronization the user picture will be overwritten in Confluence.
Users can upload own pictures, but after a new synchronization the picture from the picture storage is displayed again.
- If there is no picture for the user in the external repository defined, the users uploaded image will be preserved through synchronization tasks.

Stop Synchronization of User Pictures

Leave the field “Attribute Name” blank if no synchronization is required or if you want to stop the synchronization.

Information about Performance

On systems with many users (1000+) the first synchronization may take very long (several hours) and can impact your systems performance. To improve the process or in case of synchronization errors it is recommended to enable “Login Synchronization” for a couple of days.

Synchronization

There are 3 ways a synchronization can happen: Periodically or manually for all users (full synchronization), or at login for a single user. During this process, the data of a users profile elements is updated with the values from the configured LDAP repositories according to the mapping that was defined during configuration of the profile fields.

Please Note

The synchronization is only working in one direction. Data will only be pulled from a repository and will never be written back. This also applies to repositories which are configured as “Read/W

Administrator's Guide (v 1.10)

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