Within Loupe, users can:

• Access the web site
• Receive email notifications
• Subscribe to data from the server

There are three types of users:

• Administrators: Have full access to the web site and can administer the server and other users.
• User: A basic user that can access the web site but not content under the Administration menu.
• Virtual: A contact record that can receive notification email but can't sign into the web site or subscribe to data from the server.

Users and Licensing

• Administrators and Users require full user licenses as long as they are active (users can be deactivated and reactivated).
• Virtual users do not require any licenses.

Enterprise Edition Users

User licenses are the same for Enterprise and Standard edition.  In the case of Standard edition the users are recorded in a single repository.  For Enterprise edition the total number of unique users created in the Enterprise are counted, regardless of the number of repositories they have access to. 

Creating Users

You can create users either using the Loupe Server Administration tool or you can use the web interface, provided you are logged in as a user with Administrator access.  This means you'll need to create the first administrator using the Loupe Server Administration tool.

Active Directory Integration

Loupe Server can be configured to use one or more external Active Directories to not only authenticate users but also to manage provisioning them.  Custom credentials can be provided for integration with AD so the Loupe Server infrastructure can be in a different domain or no domain.

• Authenticating Users with Active Directory: New users can be created from an Active Directory account and will automatically update their display information and email address from AD.  Authentication for these users is passed to AD so disabling, deleting, or locking out their account in AD will prevent them from logging into Loupe immediately.
• Provisioning Users with Active Directory:  Groups can be selected in Active Directory and mapped to a Repository in Loupe Server with a specific level of access.  This facilitates completely hands-off user administration for teams.
• Support Internal Users, Active Directory Users, or Both: A Loupe Repository can be configured to support AD users exclusively or a mix of AD and Internal users.  This makes it easy for each team to have a different administration model for their repository while sharing the same Loupe infrastructure.

Configuring Active Directory

Each AD needs to be registered with the Loupe installation with Loupe Server Administrator.  When registering the AD can be specified by its name (such as "Domain.local") or by specifying a domain controller.  If the user Loupe Server is running as doesn't have access to the AD specify a user within the AD to use for all communication.

Once registered, users can be manually created in each repository from the AD by specifying any of the valid forms for their AD User name.  If desired, each repository can be configured with one or more automatic user management rules which will create and, optionally, delete users based on AD group membership.

Internal Loupe users can be used in parallel with AD users or, on a repository-by-repository basis, Internal users can be disabled.

User Avatars

Loupe automatically displays Gravatars for the user based on their email address.  If they haven't registered a Gravatar then a badge is created with their initials.