How to give someone a user account

There are three ways to grant user access to someone in Populi:

• To give it to an individual person, go to her profile.
• When you accept an applicant as a student, you can give her a user account.
• To give it to a group of students, Populi Account Administrators can use the Data Slicer.

Need to delete a user account? Have a look at this.

A few things about usernames

• Populi's default username format is first initial, last name, and last two numerals of the current year. If you give John Smith an account in January 2025, his automatically-generated username will be jsmith25. To change the default username format, have a look at this article.
• Strictly speaking, you can't change someone's username. You can, however, remove someone's user access and then immediately re-add it with a new username. This article tells you how.
• This article describes how to free up a deleted/inactive username for re-use by a new user account.

To grant user access to an individual, start by going to her profile

1. Check her user status to the right of her name in the gray bar. If she's a user, you'll see a notice saying Active User. If not, click the menu button and select Make this person a user.
2. Select Is a user from the status drop-down.
3. Populi automatically generates a username/email with her first initial, last name, and the last two digits of the current year. Keep this username, or enter another username.
4. Choose an alternate email. The Welcome email will be sent to this address. If you don't have any email addresses entered for her yet, close the dialog box, enter an email address under contact info, then go back to Step 1.
5. Click Save.

To grant access to a group of students, start by going to Academics > Reporting > Data Slicer

To use this option, you must be a Populi Account Administrator for your school.

1. Run a report or load an existing report. The report will return a list of people with the Student role who fit your filter conditions.
   • After running your report, click Columns and add a column that shows Primary Email. If a student doesn't have a primary email address, she cannot be given a user account; including this column will help you find students who won't receive an account for this reason.
2. Click Actions and select Create users.
3. Review the items mentioned in the dialog. If your report returns people who already have user accounts, they will be skipped.
4. Choose the username format. You cannot choose the email address option if your students are not given school email addresses.
5. When you're ready, click Create Users.

After creating the users, you'll see the results. This operation skips students who already have user accounts or who do not have primary email addresses.

When you create a new user account, the user gets a welcome email

The welcome email comes from notifications@populi.coand contains a link to set a Populi password and log in for the first time. She'll needs to log in within thirty calendar days of receiving the email. After that, the link expires, and you'll need to send her a password reset email.

After setting her password, she's now a full-fledged Populi user

She can now log in and make changes to Populi appropriate to the roles you gave her.

Resetting login info

Using the Active User notice, you can:

• Edit her user information (see below).
• Reset her password; when doing so, you'll need to select the email address to which you'd like to send the password reset.
• If she's required to use login approvals, you can reset her authenticator app credentials; to continue using login approvals after this, she'll need to start from scratch.
• Reset her text number by selecting an email address to which you'll send the text number reset link.

How to block a user

Blocking a user prevents her from logging in (it does not affect any of her roles).

1. Click Active User.
2. Check next to Blocked.
3. Enter a reason for the block (optional).
4. Click Save.
5. To un-block her, just come back to this dialog box and un-check Blocked.

Login approvals

You can control whether a user is required to use login approvals. Read about login approvals in this article.

1. Click Active User.
2. Check next to Login approvals to require it of the user (you cannot require it of people who only have the Student and/or Library Patron roles). If they're required, you can un-check to remove the requirement. Your choice here affects only this user; it is independent of the role-level setting chosen by the Account Administrator in Account > Security.
3. Click Save.

How to remove user access

Removing user access does not affect anything else about her record. It just means she can't log in and make changes any more!

1. Click Active User.
2. Select Is not a user from the status drop-down.
3. Click Save.
4. Her email is now permanently deleted.