Key Concepts of People Explorer
This section describes key concepts of People Explorer.
People Explorer is based on the concept of entities and the relationships between them.
An entity represents an object, such as a person, an organization, a group, or a workspace. You can define different types of entities with different attributes (properties). An entity profile comprises the complete set of attributes assigned to an entity, and the way they are displayed to the user.
A relationship defines the connection between a source entity and a target entity. You can define different types of relationships; for example, a Reports to relationship can be used to define the connection between two people, an employee and a manager.
The connection between the source and the target entities can be symmetric or asymmetric. For example, a Friend of relationship is symmetric, whereas a Reports to relationship is asymmetric.
Depending on granted permissions and the administrator configuration, users can edit properties of their own profile and create relationships with other entities.
For more information, see Working with Entities and Managing Relationships.
An attribute is a property of an entity. For example, first name and last name are attributes of a person entity.
People Explorer includes a number of predefined attributes that correspond to common information found in social networks, such as the name and address of a person. You can define additional attributes to store information that is specific to your organization's needs.
You can define attributes to contain multiple values; for example, multiple private phone numbers. You can also define attributes in an attribute group. For example, you can create an Address attribute group that contains all address-related attributes. The set of attributes in an attribute group are always displayed together.
You use attributes and attribute groups to define the properties of entities. You can use the same attribute or attribute group in multiple entities.
Presentation groups are defined for each entity to present sets of individual attributes as a group in that entity.
For more information, see Managing Attributes.
Entities and relationships are created using information from different data sources.
A data source can be offline or online.
An offline data source is either a CSV (comma-separated values) file or an archive (ZIP) that contains a CSV file and related images. For example, the images may be employee photos.
The CSV file contains the data for the entities in your system. Each line in the data source file contains values that you map to the attributes of the entities. When you define a data source, you upload the source file, and also define properties, such as the field separator, to enable parsing the file correctly.
An online data source provides data at runtime that is related to the currently logged in user. This data is merged dynamically with the information in the People Explorer database. The default online data source is the Enterprise Workspaces database.
A data source group enables you to group data sources for management purposes, according to the source type, such as a directory, a project management system, or a CRM system.
At runtime the data from all the different data sources (including the user's own edited data) is merged and combined in the profiles that the user views.
For more information, see Managing Data Providers.
A role determines the permissions a user has to view specific entities, relationships, and attributes and edit specific attributes and relationships.
For bulk role assignment, the administrator assigns roles to entities. The administrator can also assign roles to a single user, if necessary.
People Explorer comes with two basic roles: Administrator and Anonymous. You can create additional roles, as necessary.
For more information, see Managing Roles.
All configuration data can be exported from one system and imported to another system by using the NetWeaver Portal transport mechanism. You can also transport strings for translation.