Your personal profile

In BSCW, you have a personal profile consisting of useful information about yourself in­clud­ing full name, organization, address, telephone numbers, a photograph, links to additional in­for­mation on the Web, e.g. to a personal home page and the website of your organization, your public key for document encryption and digital signatures as well as your contact details in social networks and instant messaging services making it easier for other users to get in touch with you.

The information that you enter into your personal profile is presented in your personal info page, which other users may look up, e.g. to make sure that the person they are about to invite to their workspace under your user name is actually the person they mean.

In order to enter or update information in your personal profile,

•      select  Options    Profile    Change .

You may check the appearance of your current personal info page by

•      selecting  Options    Profile    Show .

The ‘Change Personal Profile’ form where you enter or update your personal profile has a number of sections grouping the information contained in the personal profile:

o  Personal Data

o  Communication

o  Time Zone

o  Picture

o  Public Key

Personal data

Personal data about yourself comprise your full name, organization, phone numbers, home page, postal address and email address. The full name and organization given in your personal profile will also be used in address book entries and members’ pages to represent a user as user entry. Such an entry will read, e.g.,

jhdoe  (John H. Doe, Acme Corp.)

when full name and organization are given, while the same user without a full name in his personal profile would be represented as

jhdoe  <john.doe@dlabs.acme.com>

You may add tags and a description to your personal data, which are shown as part of the de­scription of your entry on members’ pages.

The ‘Primary email address’ field is set to the email address that BSCW uses for sending messages to you, e.g. the daily workspace activity reports. By default, this is the email address under which you have registered with the BSCW server. If your email address has changed or if you use additional email addresses, please enter the new address or the additional addresses into the ‘Add email address’ field. For each of the secondary addresses you will have to go through a registration process similar to your initial registration.

When you have registered additional email addresses, you may choose one of them as your primary email address via selection in the respective field. Please note that the server con­fi­gu­ra­tion may not allow every user to enter additional addresses and may confine admissible ad­dresses to certain email domains.

Communication

Here, you may enter information enabling other users to get in touch with you in social net­works or via instant messaging services. To add a social network or instant mes­sag­ing service to your personal profile,

•      select an entry from the drop down list offered and press the [+ Add] button.

•      With social networks, give the URL under which you may be reached in the particular network. Possibly augment the description of the network.

•      With instant messaging services, specify user number or user identification. Instant mes­saging services allow real-time com­munication between two or more users, uti­lizing plain text messages, voice or even video telephony. Click the  buttons to learn more about services that you do not know yet.

•      In order to remove a social network or instant messaging service from your personal profile, click its  button.

The contact data entered will be shown under ‘Contact details’ on your user info page and are to be used by other users wanting to get in contact with you.

Time Zone

Here you may select your local time zone, i.e. the time zone where you are currently located. All temporal information presented at the BSCW interface, e.g. the time of events, is adjusted to this personal setting. The default value for the time zone is the time zone of your BSCW server.

If you choose ‘no time zone selected’ as your time zone, you may specify your local time zone in the ‘Hour’ and ‘Minute’ fields (value in the latter field should be 0 or 30, otherwise it is rounded to one of these values). With other time zone selections, any input in these fields is ignored.

You may also choose your preferred date format, which is then again used for the display of all dates at your BSCW user interface.

Picture

In order to add a picture of yourself to your personal info page, either

•      choose ‘Use existing or external image’ and enter a URL into the ‘Picture URL’ field that points to such an image on the Web,

or

•      choose ‘Upload a new picture’ to upload a picture from your local computer. Use the [Browse...] button to select the picture or type the file path into the ‘Local file’ field. You can enter a picture name different from the default one and a description. The up­loaded picture file is stored in your home folder. The access rights are set in such a way that all registered users may look at this picture. After uploading, the field ‘Pic­ture URL’ will point to this picture document in your home folder.

In general, MIME type and encoding of the picture are recognized correctly and assigned to the picture. If necessary the MIME type may be corrected using   Change    Type  for the picture document in your home folder.

Public Key

Your public key is used for encrypting and digitally signing documents in connection with the use of BSCW Desktop. For details consult the online help of BSCW Desktop (this program can be installed via  Options    Preferences  in the top menu). This section will only appear if sup­port for storage and exchange of encryption keys has been activated for your BSCW ser­ver.

Select the public key file using the [Browse...] button or enter the file path into the ‘Local file’ field. Optionally, you may also give a name and description of the key.