Maintain User Profiles and Information - Article
Summary
The user profile brings together the person's identity, business relationships, preferences, and relevant learning context. Its value depends on accurate information and a clear understanding of who may see or change it.
Use this article to:
- Maintain information that serves a real administrative purpose.
- Understand how forms, permissions, and connected sources affect updates.
- Use profile information without confusing it with enrollment, commerce, or certification evidence.
Treat the profile as information used by rules
Profile data can support audience selection, onboarding, reporting, communication, and personalization. The operational logic does not all live inside the profile: activity settings, organization controls, feature configuration, and integrations decide how those values are used.
For example, a Department value can help identify an onboarding audience, but changing the field is not itself proof that the person has been enrolled. An organization relationship can affect administration and visibility without making every training offer available.
This distinction helps administrators investigate outcomes. Check both the underlying information and the configured rule that consumes it.
Open and edit a profile
Find the user in Users, confirm the identity, and open the profile. Use the available Edit action to maintain permitted information.
The profile’s visible sections and editing tabs depend on enabled features and permissions. Your ability to view a field does not necessarily include permission to edit it. A role, organizational relationship, limited-profile configuration, or connected source may affect what is available.
The standard profile form is configured under Settings → Forms → Profile. The administrative Create user, Signup, and enrollment forms have their own contexts; do not assume one form change gives every route identical fields.
Organize information by purpose
| Information area | Use it for | Important boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Identity and contact details | Recognizing the account and communicating with the person. | Check account matching before changing email or Username, particularly for connected identities. |
| Business and employment information | Segmentation, operational context, and reporting. | A self-entered company or job title is not automatically a verified membership or permission. |
| Organization membership | The person’s managed customer, partner, or business-unit relationships. | Membership is not the same as training enrollment or a descriptive Company field. |
| Role and manager relationships | Administrative responsibility and staff oversight. | These values can affect access; treat changes as authorization decisions, not ordinary text edits. |
| Preferences | Language, time zone, notification scheme, and supported interests. | Available translations, notification rules, and organization-specific tags still influence the result. |
| Learning information | A convenient route to training, Skills, Certificates, and other enabled features. | Use the corresponding learning record for the actual completion or credential question. |
| Legal permissions | Evidence of recorded policy acceptance and questionnaire consents. | Visibility is not permission to give or change another person’s consent. |
Decide who maintains each field
A field can be updated manually, through import, by a connected system, or through a configured questionnaire. Agree the authoritative source for important information before introducing another update process.
Where a role-based profile-editing configuration is enabled, specified roles can edit managed users’ fields even when the users cannot edit those fields themselves. This capability is configurable; it does not mean every Manager or Course Administrator can edit every account.
When organization filtering applies, your scope also matters. You may be able to maintain a user connected to your organization without having permission to remove that user’s relationship with another organization outside your scope.
If a local correction is later reversed, inspect the source of the next update instead of repeatedly changing the same value.
Preferences and interests
Use Preferences to maintain the available language, time zone, notification scheme, and interest settings. These choices should support the person’s experience, not merely satisfy a completed form.
Interests use Category tags where configured. They can be maintained manually, supplied through import, and populated from categories associated with activity enrollment. Organization-specific tag visibility can limit which choices are appropriate for a user.
An Interests block may also appear on the profile where enabled. Do not treat interests as certificates or validated Skills: they express a different kind of information.
Questionnaires can collect and update information
Two related concepts should be distinguished:
| Mechanism | What it does | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Supplemental questionnaire | Provides a configured questionnaire through profile editing and displays submitted information in the profile context. | Its availability and who may view or edit responses depend on configuration and permissions. |
| Profile-updating questionnaire questions | Write configured answers into supported profile fields. | Updating a response and updating the underlying profile are not automatically the same operation for every question. |
Configured questionnaire questions can update supported profile information, including address and Company fields. These updates occur on full submission by an authenticated user. Anonymous distribution does not provide the authenticated identity needed for that update.
Submitted values can overwrite existing profile data. Explain this to the owner of an onboarding or profile-refresh questionnaire, especially if an integration also maintains those fields. Collect only what the process needs and avoid conflicting sources for the same information.
Checkout information does not rewrite the profile
Checkout can begin with values from a user’s profile, but edits made to personal information during checkout are stored with the Transaction rather than written back to the profile.
This is useful when someone enters details appropriate to one order without intending to change their academy identity. It also means checkout should not be used as a general profile-enrichment process.
When Finance and Support see different information, compare the historical Transaction information with the current profile. Neither should be silently treated as a copy of the other.
Profile visibility and biography
Profile visibility depends on organizational scope and supported limited-profile settings. Some viewers may see only a name and avatar. Participants are not entitled to inspect other participants’ training histories simply because a profile link is visible.
Where Biography is available, it can provide a useful instructor or professional introduction. Files included in a biography can be accessible through direct public links. Do not place confidential documents or private learner information there. Reusing the same file in an Announcement or another restricted area does not make that publicly accessible file private.
Use the profile as an appropriate professional and administrative record, not as a convenient repository for unrestricted sensitive attachments.
Passwords, connected accounts, and consents
Password and two-factor authentication options concern the person’s sign-in security. Their availability differs for local and connected accounts. Connected accounts can also relate to personal calendar or document integrations; not every connection is an SSO identity.
The Legal permissions tab records supported privacy-policy and questionnaire-consent information. Required consents are not ordinary editable profile fields. Users can change supported optional consents for themselves; masquerading does not authorize an administrator to change the person’s consent.
If a consent or identity correction has legal or security implications, use the designated organizational process rather than treating it as routine data cleanup.
Practical maintenance patterns
| Situation | Recommended approach | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Employee changes department | Update the authoritative source or approved local field, then inspect the dependent memberships and learning rules. | The business change is reflected without assuming every downstream effect happened automatically. |
| Customer needs order-specific billing details | Maintain the order’s Transaction information through the approved commercial process. | The customer’s platform profile is not repurposed for one order. |
| Academy refreshes contact information | Use an approved authenticated questionnaire or controlled profile-maintenance process. | Information is collected consistently with understood overwrite behavior. |
| Partner Manager corrects a member record | Use the permitted fields within the managed scope and escalate source-owned or restricted fields. | Delegation remains useful without bypassing governance. |
Verify the outcome
For a meaningful profile change, check the correct User ID, the saved value, the intended viewer/edit permissions, and one relevant downstream outcome. If a business rule depends on the field, verify that rule’s result separately rather than assuming the profile save completed the whole process.
Troubleshooting
| Problem | What to check |
|---|---|
| A field is absent | Check Profile form configuration, the editing/view context, and enabled features. |
| A field is visible but cannot be edited | Check field editability, role configuration, organizational scope, and the authoritative source. |
| A questionnaire did not update the profile | Check the question’s update option, full submission, supported target field, and authenticated user context. |
| Profile and checkout details differ | Compare current profile values with the Transaction’s personal information; checkout edits do not rewrite the profile. |
| A value keeps changing back | Identify imports, integration mappings, or questionnaires that write the same field. |
FAQ
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Do changes made during checkout update the user's profile?
No. Edits to personal information during checkout are stored with the Transaction rather than written back to the current profile. Maintain the profile through its appropriate editing or source-system process.
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Can a questionnaire replace existing profile information?
Yes. Supported questions configured to update a profile can overwrite the corresponding values when an authenticated user fully submits the questionnaire. Anonymous responses do not provide the authenticated identity required for this update.
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Why does a corrected profile value change back later?
Another process may own or update the field, such as an import, SSO mapping, integration, questionnaire, or onboarding form. Identify the source of truth and its next update before editing the value again; otherwise a correct local change can be overwritten.