Jive SBS Self-Registration Pros and Cons

This is going to be a rather technical post, which is fitting since I've spent pretty much the past month in nearly-full-time system administrator mode. It's not how I prefer to allocate my time, but there were things that just needed to be done.

During that time, I changed the process by which we create new user accounts for Jive SBS. For the first year, we manually created new user accounts (thousands of them). We didn't have a central directory across our company, so we couldn't use LDAP.

Now that we have used self-registration for a month, I'd like to consider the plusses and minuses of each approach. Spoiler alert: neither one is ideal.

What's Good About Manually Creating Accounts

1. Accounts get set up. You have a list of people who need accounts, a User Admin creates them, and they are done. This doesn't always happen with self-registration, as I'll explain below.
2. Usernames are consistent. Well, admins make mistakes, too, but in general your naming convention will be followed. There are a number of reasons this is important. First, we don't want goofy usernames like hellokitty or racy ones, either. Second, usernames in Jive SBS are case-sensitive, so we require them to be all lowercase. That is intended to cut down on confusion when people try to recall their username, and to avoid ridiculous scenarios where we could have two separate accounts such as TSmith and tsmith.
3. The User Admin adds the new user to whatever admin groups are needed to provide appropriate access levels.

What's Not Good About Manually Creating Accounts

1. Even though it only takes about a minute to create each account, that's a lot of minutes when you're creating thousands of accounts. It's a lot of admin work.
2. Because it's a lot of admin work, we spread it out by empowering many people as User Admins. That means a loss of oversight and control over the account creation process, and I don't like that.
3. Just because the account is created, it doesn't mean it's being used. We may have deluded ourselves in thinking that by creating all these accounts we now had that many people "in" the system. Activity reports suggest otherwise. Creating an account for someone doesn't necessarily engage them.
4. We only filled in the minimum profile fields. Even though we urged people to update their profiles with critical contact information, many did not (see the point above about usage).
5. There's no way to force people to agree to the site's terms and conditions when you create accounts for people. Since we didn't have our t&c ready when we launched, that didn't matter then. But it does now.

What's Good About Self-Registration

1. You can force people to accept the terms and conditions of using the site when they register. This alone is an important reason to consider this method.
2. You can force people to populate whatever profile fields you designate as required. This has resulted in much more complete profiles among our new users in the past month. I really like this.
3. It's less admin work. All I have to do is approve the pending registration. However, it's not all peaches and cream from an admin standpoint (see below).
4. The people who have new accounts have engaged. They have invested at least a few minutes of their time setting up their profile. I don't have stats on this, but I am guessing they will be more active in using the tool initially than those whose accounts were created for them.

What's Not Good About Self-Registration

1. Not everyone registers. We have a pretty large percentage of people so far who have been invited to register but they haven't done it, so they are not in the system. However, at least we have an accurate picture of who is not engaged. These people clearly are not.
2. Admin work has not gone away. In fact, there are a ton of headaches to deal with, and since for security reasons I've centralized the approval process with me, I am spending a ton of time dealing with lots of little things. I'll list the various issues here.
3. Employment verification - since people are submitting registrations instead of us working from an approved list of employees (ours is an internal community), the employment status of each applicant needs to be verified. When managers follow the proper process, this is pretty easy. But when they don't, it eats up my time and delays the process. (Note: email domain verification won't work for us, for a number of reasons.)
4. Permissions still need to be set up by an admin - I have to manually grant basic permissions to new accounts and their local admin has to give them any special permissions they need. Easy enough, but these steps take time and failing to do them causes problems.
5. People who have accounts apply for new ones. I wish I could magically make everyone read instructions and follow them. It says right on the login page what to do if you already have an account, but plenty of people still are going through the entire process of trying to create a new account (I guess this speaks to my point about engagement, earlier). So I have to check to see if they have an account and then email them with the directions they should have followed in the first place. Plus, I have to alter their registration form so the email address they used doesn't get locked in the database as "taken." Quite an annoying waste of time, and before we had the "create an account" link people couldn't get mixed up this way. Need a dummy-proof solution to this...
6. People are lazy and don't follow instructions and I end up editing their profiles before I approve them. I may have to give up on this, but I hate seeing it look unprofessional.Some don't capitalize anything in their profile, or they mispell things or enter information in the wrong place. Amazingly, some select the wrong division from the dropdown box (they don't know where they work). And my favorite is putting "Miss" or "Mr." in the Title field instead of their job title.
7. There's a bug that I discovered (and reported, but I don't know when it'll be fixed) which breaks the approval process if you change the username before approving the account. Some people don't follow the username naming instructions ("use your email address in all lowercase letters"). This forces me to leave inappropriate usernames as they are and simply approve the account. The only way around it is to approve the account, then edit the username, and then send an email to the user trying to explain what to do (when they've already gotten the automated email with the other username). I could reject the application and tell people to start over, but we have enough trouble getting people to register, so I am loathe to do that.
8. In Jive SBS, User Admins have permission to create accounts, disable accounts and edit user profiles -- and they can approve pending accounts. That's created a ton of extra work for me, as we have dozens of User Admins solely because they need to be able to promptly disable accounts of people who leave the company. But at least a couple of dozen times they have approved pending accounts inappropriately, and the clean up work I've had to do on the back-end is considerable and very time-consuming. It also makes us look like idiots to the person applying for an account, as they get an email saying they are approved but they don't have any permissions, and then they get an "oops" email saying we messed up.

So, Which Is the Best Approach for Creating New User Accounts?

I don't think one approach is clearly better than the other. That's why I spelled out all the pros and cons of each method. Choose for yourself which method you think meets your needs best.

Of course, we're still new at the self-registration process and it's possible (I hope!) that over time we'll figure out solutions to the problems we've encountered with it. If anyone has any suggestions in that area, I'd love to hear them!