Linchpin Enterprise News
Share your company's news with your employees
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Two ways to influence users' personal news subscriptions
General Concept for Default Subscriptions
The Enterprise News Bundle comes with the ability for users to subscribe to certain spaces they are interested in. The macro Personal News Feed (and starting with version 2.2 of the Enterprise News Bundle, the Cover Stories macro in a certain configuration) then display news from those spaces the user has subscribed to.
For a new user, though, theses news feeds start empty, because he or she hasn't subscribed to anything yet. As Personal News Feed macros often are used on dashboards, that makes for a bad first impression.
Therefore we introduced default subscriptions in version 2.2. As an admin you can set one ore several spaces to be default subscription spaces. New users will have them assigned to their subscriptions. Later on, the users can edit those subscriptions, adding new spaces and unsubscribing from existing ones, but they never start out with empty news feeds.
Within the Confluence Administration, look for the entry "Default news subscriptions".
There's only one input field. Simply start typing the name of the space you want to set as a default space for subscriptions. An autocomplete will offer matching spaces. Select one, and it will be added. Start typing in the name of a second space, and so on. You can set as many spaces as defaults as you want.
If you want to remove a space, klick on the x of the respective entry.
Click the Save button to complete your configuration
Default spaces only have an effect on new users. A user who already has his or her own subscriptions will not be affected.
Also, if you add another space later, this again will only affect new users.
Taking away a space from the defaults will not cause this space to be unsubscribed for the users.
These default spaces aren't mandatory subscriptions - users can always opt to unsubscribe from these spaces.
The only thing a user cannot do is having no subscriptions at all: If he or she does so, the default spaces will be applied again.
General Concept for Obligatory Subscriptions
The usual setup on most dashboards is this: A Cover Stories macro for all the important news a company wants their employees to know, plus a Personal News Feed macro for the news, the employee wants to read about. They can change their subscriptions to influence which news will be displayed in their feed, but they cannot influence which news will be displayed via the Cover Stories.
The downside on this setup is that it needs a lot of space. Obligatory subscriptions is a way to combine both cases in one macro. Let's say you have Cover Stories on your dashboard, and you set it to show the user's subscriptions. Now you can define obligatory subscriptions, so news from certain spaces will be added to those news the user subscribed to. The user cannot unsubscribe from those, hence the name "obligatory".
You'll have a mix of both use cases in only one macro, which frees up screen real estate for other stuff on your dashboard.
Go to your Confluence administration and look up Linchpin Enterprise News → Personal news subscriptions.
The center tab is where you define your obligatory subscriptions.
If you are using Linchpin Enterprise News as a standalone product, not combined with other Linchpin apps and especially the Linchpin Manager, you'll find only one single input field there. Select one or severals spaces you want to everybody's subscriptions, click on save and you're done.
In our example on the left we selected "Corporate News" as the obligatory subscription space. Please note that you can only assign spaces and their respective news. As of today, it's not possible to subscribe to anything else.
Different obligatory subscriptions for different users: personalization
This functionality is available as soon as you have installed the additional Linchpin Manager app with a valid license.
If your are running Linchpin Enterprise News together with the Linchpin Manager app (and valid licenses, of course), you can personalize the obligatory subscriptions based on users' profiles.
For example you might have corporate news you want to push into users' subscription feeds, but you have english and german users as well as english and german corporate news spaces. It's possible via personalization to push the english news to english users and the german news to german users. Or to push the german news to german users and the english news to everyone else. Let's take this last case as our example here.
First you need to determine the distinguishing profile feature. In our example on the left we set the user's locale as relevant. You can set up to three different profile fields for this. Examples might be location, country, department etc. In order to separate the obligatory subscriptions regarding languages, the user's locale is likely the best one, since the locale determines which language will be used throughout Confluence for this user.
Now you tell the system, which news goes to whom.
In our example we defined: Send news from the space "Corporate News Deutschland" to users with a locale starting with de*. This way you include de_DE for german users, de_AT for austrian users and so on. The * acts as a wildcard here.
The second line says: Send news from the space "Corporate News" to everyone else. NOT is a logical operator here.
Read more about wildcards and logical operators.
A click on save will save your configuration.