Managing settings for your school's Populi account

The Account section is accessible to your school's Populi Account Administrator(s); the Invoices/Payments view is also available to your school's Billing Contact. It lets you:

• Pay your school's Populi invoices
• Control general settings for your school's Populi setup (see below), security, and appearance
• Download backup copies of your Populi data
• Monitor various account usage statistics and use high-level reporting tools
• Set up a localization—a translation of Populi for your users who don't speak or read English

To get to the Account section:

1. You must first be listed as an Account Administrator or Billing Contact.
2. Click your name/photo next to the Help link in the upper right of the screen.
3. Select Account & Settings.
4. Click the Account view (next to My Settings).

Account Administrators

Every school has at least one Populi Account Administrator (AA). The AA is a high-level Staff member who ought to have access to the sensitive settings and information in the Account section. In other words, don't hand out this access willy-nilly! It's best to have two AAs, and also good to keep this access restricted to those who need to have it.

Your school's first AA was the person who initially set up your school's Populi account. Additional AA's can be added by giving an existing user the Staff role and then going to Account > Security to add that person as an AA.

Account Settings

General Settings

The contact info fields here are reproduced on your school's transcripts and other exported documents (financial statements, etc.) that use Populi's built-in templates. Additionally, you'll find a couple settings that govern how your school's data will be reported to IPEDS.

Customizations

These settings enable and disable various features throughout Populi. If you elect to later set up Bookstore and Library, you'll come here to take the final step to enable them. Other settings include:

• Disable Financial: If you're not using Billing or Financial Aid, this hides the Profile > Financial view from non-Staff users.
• Disable birthday announcements: Populi includes a Happy Birthday note on Home >Dashboard on a user's birthday. If you're a real party-pooper, you can disable these notices.
• Disable profile Bulletin Boards: Guess what this setting does.
• Welcome Email: When you create a new user account, the user gets an email with a link to set up her password. You can add your own text to the basic welcome email.
• Additional Gender Options: Additional gender options will be added to the list of values that can be chosen in the Gender field.

Security

Security settings govern how a variety of sensitive items are handled, including whether your school uses login approvals. Read about security settings.

Appearance

The appearance settings let you customize the colors in your school's Populi header, upload logo files, and customize some other items. These are generally self-explanatory, but a few notes about the dark theme color settings:

• If you're using the built-in Populi color scheme, rest assured that we have carefully chosen header and header text colors with contrast and accessibility in mind—both light and dark themes have been fine-tuned for you already.
• Dark theme colors demand somewhat less contrast than light theme. If you have custom colors for your light theme header and text, here's one way to get dark theme colors that should work for your school's users:
  1. Copy your six-digit light theme color code into the dark theme color code.
  2. Click the color-picker.
  3. For the header color, drag the picker circle down a bit (to decrease brightness) and perhaps to the left, as well (to decrease saturation).
  4. For text colors, you likely want the text to be a very light grey rather than pure white, so drag the picker circle down. The light theme default is FFFFFF; entering EEEEEE might also just do the trick.

Integrations and Single Sign-On

These are sensitive settings that should be managed by someone with technical expertise. You can read more about these functions in the Developer articles; LTI tools are covered in this article.

Localizations

Localizations let you supply a translation of some or all of your school's Populi site for non-English-speaking users. Read about setting up a localization.

Text Messaging

This view shows you how your dedicated text messaging numbers are being used.

Backups

Populi lets you download your core data once every 24 hours from Account > Backups. The backup file includes:

• Academics: Everything from transcripts to transfer credits, from course lessons to the course catalog
• Financial transactions: Invoices, payments, financial aid, and donations
• Admissions: Applications and all the information you have for your leads
• People: All the people in your system together with all their contact and other personal info
• Other items: Your entire Bookstore and Library

You can manually download the backup every 24 hours.

1. Click Request a Backup.
2. Populi will begin preparing CSV files of your current data. This process can take anywhere from several minutes to several hours. It will go on behind the scenes, so you can go do something else for the time being.
3. When the backup is ready, you'll receive an email. Return to the Backups section to download it. Backups are available for one week from the time they are made available, after which they are deleted.
4. Keep the backup file safe! Now that it's exported from Populi, it's up to you to keep this information secure.

You can also use the API to automatically download backups.

For details about how your backed-up data is stored and deleted in compliance with the European Union's GDPR, have a look at this article.

Files

The Files view keeps track of how much of your school's file storage has been used. "Files" include all files the users at your school have uploaded to Populi—including documents, images, videos, profile pictures, etc. See the Populi Terms of Service for details.

You can also manage the personal file storage limits for the user role groups at your school:

1. Click next to the user role.
2. Enter the number of MB worth of file storage you wish people with that user role to have.
   • Every 1000 MB is a GB.
   • Remember that individual users' personal file storage counts towards your school's overall file storage limit!
   • If a user has multiple roles, the role with the highest limit will determine his personal file storage limit.
3. When you're done, click Save.

Reporting

The Reporting view gives you three reporting tools, each of which can be filtered to zoom in on the relevant information:

• Changes: This is a master changelog of all items in your school's Populi instance for which changes are tracked.
• Logins: This records all login attempts—both successes and failures—recorded for your school's Populi instance.
• Integrations: Primarily of interest to technical folk and masochists, this records the various messages (successes and errors) produced by your school's various software integrations.
• Automations: This report shows you which of your school's automations have been triggered in a given timeframe.
• API: A log of all activity between your school's Populi site and any applications you've connected to it via the API.

Domains

This article describes how to manage DNS and SPF settings that allow Populi to send email on your school's behalf.