A profile field just for employees to fill out, but visible to everyone...

Former Member
Former Member

1. Is it possible to have a profile field just for employees to fill out, though visible to everyone on the user profile page? The use case is that we are creating roles for employee teams: Support, Customer Success, Marketing, etc. We'd like that role to show up on an employee's profile page. I understand how to do that by adding a user profile field and adding it to a user profile group. But is there a way to make that field show up ONLY when an employee is editing their profile, and NOT when a customer is editing their profile? Since these roles don't apply to customers, I don't want them seeing an "Employee Team" dropdown at all.

2. Also, I'm assuming that to do all of this, I need to add BOTH roles AND user profile fields with the names of the employee teams (Customer Success, Support, Marketing, etc. But is there a way for the user profile to draw in the roles directly, so that I don't have to add them in two places on the back end? In other words, can I set up the employee team roles, and then somehow make it possible for an employee to choose one of those employee team roles directly from their profile page WITHOUT having to add in an identical set of user profile fields? I'm guessing not, but wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything. 

  • You can't restrict profile fields based on roles; however, there are other ways to accomplish what you want.

    It sounds like your end goal is to display the employee's team on their profile page (and additionally you could display it in the hover popup when you mouse over an avatar). To do this, you don't need any input from the employee themselves - they should already be in the role(s) you created.

    The easiest way to do this would probably be to assign avatars to each employee team role. The avatar will display automatically in the User - Badges widget on the profile page.

    Alternatively, you can edit some widgets (or possibly create a new one) to display the information where you'd like it. It sounds from other threads like you are new to Community (welcome!) so I'll link the developer training for widgets. It would probably be easiest to start with editing the user hover widget to check which role a user is it, probably with IsUserInRoles calls for each of the roles. Then you can move to adding something similar for the profile page, either in a new custom widget or edited in to an existing widget. (Do keep in mind that customizing existing widgets, while sometimes necessary, will make future upgrades slightly more work-intensive.) You can see how widgets are laid out on the profile page by navigating to any profile page with an admin account and going to (Pencil icon) > Manage Site Theme > Edit this page.

  • I like suggestion for you on this, also wonder if this listing from Social Edge would be helpful for your particular scenario:  https://community.telligent.com/marketplace/mp/listings/profile-insights   

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member in reply to Steven Heffner

    This is great! I will probably save the user hover widget for post-launch, but it's really good to know that I can do that.

    The assigning avatars to each employee team role is precisely the easy answer I was hoping for. THANK YOU!

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member in reply to Grant Pankonien

    Thanks, Grant. We are actually looking at that widget to make sure that our employees have access to their customer's contact info. I met with Social Edge a couple of weeks ago, and will be following up with them soon. I appreciate the suggestion!