Registration
The registration process in ALOE was designed to be as simple as possible, only asking the user for the information that is absolutely necessary to register:
• a nickname that is used to login and to represent the user in ALOE (here, the interface offers the opportunity to check whether the nickname that was entered is available),
• a password for the login that will also have to be confirmed to avoid mis-spellings,
• an email address used by ALOE to communicate with the user, and
• a confirmation of the ALOE terms of services as well as the ALOE privacy policy25.
If the provided information is valid, an email will usually be sent to the user with a confirmation link that the user must click to confirm the registration and thus to finish the registration process (this feature can also be turned off). This confirmation process ensures that the provided email is valid and really belongs to the user. It further avoids registrations by spammers.
21See http://vimeo.com
22See http://www.dailymotion.com
23See http://maps.google.com
24See http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse
25See Appendix C
Login
To login, a user simply has to provide his/her nickname and the respective pass-word. The user further has the possibility to stay logged in with cookie (otherwise, logging in is required every time the browser is restarted). When a user has for-gotten his/her password, Forgot your password offers the opportunity to define a new password. To do this, the user only has to provide a nickname; the system will then send an email to the corresponding email address with a link to an ALOE page where the user can set the new password.
LDAP support
ALOE also offers to connect to an existing LDAP server allowing the reuse of ex-isting authentication mechanisms (see Section 6.4.2). In such a case, the registra-tion process is slightly modified: The user has to provide the LDAP-credentials, and an additional nickname used to represent the user in ALOE. In the ALOE LDAP Broker Web Service, which realises this functionality, an ALOE password is automatically generated for the user, and the mapping between LDAP login and the ALOE credentials is stored. This way, ALOE avoids that the user’s LDAP password needs to be stored in the ALOE database. When logging in to ALOE, the user simply has to provide the LDAP credentials.
User Profiles
As already described in Section 5.2.2, ALOE can store a variety of information about users. Such information is displayed and respectively entered on user profile pages (see Figure 5.14). In order to ease the input for the user, select fields26 are provided wherever possible (e.g., for gender, country, and spoken languages).
For the fields interest and affiliation, ALOE administrators can choose whether to allow free text, to define a fixed vocabulary (e.g., a given interest vocabulary or selected organisational units), or to use categories from a specific taxonomy.
To allow full control of their data, users can decide whether the Additional In-formation that is provided is always hidden for others, visible for every logged in user, or only visible for the users added to his/her contact list (see Section 5.3.2).
26A select field in an HTML form offers a select list (or drop-down list) to the user, so that no values have to be entered.
5.3 ALOE Functionalities
Figure 5.14:Screenshot of a user’s own profile page in ALOE
User Activities
When checking the own profile or other user’s profile pages, not only the data provided by them is shown, but also information about the user’s activities in ALOE.
Figure 5.15 shows a screenshot of a page with an overview of latest user ac-tivities regarding different aspects such as resources, groups, and collections.
For each of these aspects a detailed page with more information about the latest activities with respect to them exists.
Figure 5.15:Screenshot of a user activities page in ALOE
Contact Lists
Users in ALOE can maintain contact lists by adding or removing other users.
This option is always offered on the profile pages of other users. Contacts in ALOE are explicitly modelled in a non-symmetric way in ALOE because it is not wanted that people are forced to confirm contact requests. Nevertheless, when adding a user to one’s contact list, this user gets notified with a respective email that offers a link to the profile page of the adding user, and with a note that it is also possible to add this user to the own contact list. This notification feature can optionally be turned off by an ALOE administrator, because in some scenarios, e.g., in an enterprise context, users could feel forced to put other users on their contact lists (see Section 6.4.2).
As of now, contact lists in ALOE are used for three purposes:
5.3 ALOE Functionalities
• As a shortcut to access information of users,
• to regulate who may access additional information in one’s user profile, and
• to provide the basis of advanced functionalities that take this information into account.
Messages
Each user in ALOE can send and receive messages within the system. Sending a message is usually possible via using a message popup, where users can specify a subject and a message text.
An inbox and a sentbox are offered to manage ALOE messages. There, users can access and delete messages as well as reply to them. The following message types are distinguished:
Private messages are messages sent to one ALOE user by clicking the respec-tive link on this user’s profile page.
Group messages are messages that are sent to all members to a group (here, the additional option reply all is offered).
System messages are messages that were automatically sent by ALOE (e.g., information about being added to another user’s contact list).
In order to avoid that users have to access the ALOE Web interface to check for new messages, ALOE offers to automatically forward ALOE messages to the user’s email address as provided when registering.
Web Service API acceptRegistrationRequest, addCategoryToUser, addCon-tact, changePassword, confirmEmail, deleteFromContacts, deleteMessageFromInbox, deleteMessageFromSentbox, deleteUserAccount, denyRegistrationRequest, emailAvail-able, getCategoryRelationsForUsers, getInboxMessages, getMessage, getRegis-trationRequests, getSentboxMessages, getUserContacts, getUserData, getUser-DataBeans, getUserRelatedCategories, getUserTagCloud, login, nicknameAvail-able, registerUser, removeCategoryFromUser, requestResetPassword, resetPassword, searchUsers, sendMessage, setUserConfiguration, updateUserData