App Management: Subscriptions

Table of contents

What are subscriptions?

Adding subscriptions

Subscriptions for everyone in the organization

Subscriptions for an audience

Re-run subscriptions

People subscriptions

Removing users from subscriptions

What are subscriptions?

Subscriptions are used to automatically assign an audience to site membership or to follow a site or person.

An audience is a subset of the employees based on any combination of their user attributes like company, department, division, city, state, country or people category. When you add a new user to an audience, and that audience is subscribed to a site, that user will automatically be subscribed to the site.

• Subscriptions can be made to follow public, private or unlisted sites.
• If the user with applicable permissions (see Adding subscriptions below) pushes a subscription to a site for which they are not part of the management team, an approval request will be sent to the Site owner and Site managers to approve the subscription
• Site owners/managers can govern their own subscriptions via Manage site > Subscriptions
• If a subscription is added to a private or unlisted site, a site admin will need to approve the subscription before it can be added. This can be approved by navigating to Manage site > Subscriptions.
• Subscriptions can be mandatory.
• Subscriptions can be created for everyone in the organization or can be created within a segment.

Adding subscriptions

With the right permission settings, you can add subscriptions by navigating to your user profile image and clicking Manage > Subscriptions, or from Manage site > Subscriptions.

Note that by default, not everyone can create subscriptions. App managers do not have access to all sites implicitly now, which is a requirement for creating subscriptions. If a user's only role is app manager, they only have access to manage public sites by default. Private and unlisted sites access must be given to them additionally. Since subscriptions can exist across multiple sites, they can be managed only by a user with access to all sites. The following combination of roles can manage subscriptions:

• App manager + All sites manager
• App manager + Private sites manager + Unlisted sites manager
• Standard user + All sites manager
• Standard user + Public sites manager + Private sites manager + Unlisted sites manager

For more on understanding roles across the intranet, click here. 

When adding a subscription you can choose whether to create it for everyone in the organization or to use an audience. 

Subscriptions for everyone in the organization 

Subscriptions can be made to include everyone in the organization. This allows you to auto-follow all employees to a site or person that is relevant to everyone. 

It is possible to make a mandatory subscription to a site that includes everyone in the organization, meaning that no employees could unfollow that site.

Subscriptions for an audience

Creating a subscription for an audience allows you to auto-follow specific groups of employees to relevant sites and people based on their interests. Now, you can easily select an already created audience.

Once a user is added to a subscription, they're automatically made a member of the site(s) that subscription is tied to. If a user is removed from the audience, they're removed as a member of the site, unless that user is a Site owner or manager or has been manually added to the site.

If the audience attached to the subscription is deleted, users will be removed from the site as well.

• Any change in a user’s profile attribute (the one used to create the audience) will auto-update the audience/subscription, therefore auto-add/remove a user from the subscription

Re-run Subscriptions

Re-run subscription can be used for scenarios where subscriptions overlap or were created after the majority of users were already in the org. This way, you would be able to apply or reapply the subscription, eliminating the hassle of removing and then re-adding another subscription with the same details.

You can also re-run a subscription when:

• You want to add a user (or users) back to the site if they were removed by a Site owner/manager
• You need to add members to an audience or subscription. This should happen automatically upon placing a new user in an audience, but if for any reason that doesn't happen, re-running the subscription should allow the changes to take effect. 

Note:

If you're managing site with a mandatory subscription, you can remove members, but they will automatically be added back the next time the subscription runs in Schedulers or if the subscription is re-run.

Subscriptions to People

Regarding people subscriptions, let’s consider a scenario where User 1 is following User 2. In this case, User 1 should see all the relevant feeds related to User 2, including any content authored by them. Additionally, if there is any activity on that content and if User 1 is also a member of the group or site where the content was created, that activity will also be visible to User 1.

Being subscribed to a user is the same functionality as manually following the user.

A common example of utilizing people subscriptions is as follows: You'd like all users to follow the CEO of the company so they don't miss important updates from that person. Create a subscription to the CEO so that everyone automatically follows the CEO, as opposed to having everyone individually follow the CEO. This eliminates the need for manual follow actions while keeping the functionality unchanged. Feeds, recommendations, recognitions, and digest emails will continue to work the same way as they did with manual follows. This automation is simply an enhancement to streamline the process of following users.

Removing users from a subscription

Prior to the 24.01 release, removing a user from site membership has always been a manual process. And that is still an option. App and Site managers can remove any users they'd like from sites manually. 

However, now, a user will be removed automatically from a site if any of their profile attributes used as parameters to create an audience and subscribe to a site are changed. 

In other words, if the user became a site member via subscription, and no longer fits the parameters for the audience, they are removed as a member from the site.

A user can be added as a member to a site three ways:

1. App/Site managers approve the user's request to join
2. App/Site managers manually search for and add the user
3. Via subscriptions using audiences

This enhancement will cover only the third scenario, where a user is removed from a site due to a change in the user profile attribute was used as a parameter to create an audience and subscribe to a site.

1. The user should be removed from a site if they don't exist in any audience used for subscribing to the site.
2. The removed user should no longer be a member or a follower of the site.
3. The user will not be removed if they are currently a Site owner, Site manager or Content manager of the site.
4. The user will not be removed if they were manually added to the site and not part of any audience used for site subscriptions.
5. Any change in the user’s profile attribute should auto-update the audience/subscription and hence auto-add/remove a user from the site membership.

When any subscription is deleted and unfollowed, all the users added via the subscription will be removed from the site other than the members who are App managers, Site owners or Content/Site managers. In this case we are not checking if the user is added manually.

Once deployed, this feature will not adjust any historical site subscriptions, only audience changes in subscriptions moving forward. The reason is that for historical subscriptions we don't know whether users were added manually or via subscription. Moving forward we are tracking this