Kavi Members manages company, user and membership data and handles most of the access control functionality for your organization's website, so it's important that all Kavi Members configuration options are set according to your organization's requirements before the website goes live. Kavi Members configuration has a profound effect on all aspects of the website, since other applications draw on Kavi Members for user access permissions and data management.

Kavi Members options are used to set organizational properties that determine site configuration at the global level, such as whether the organization is company-based or individual-based or both. In a company-based organization, most users are company representatives, and have a relationship with the organization only because their company has a relationship with the organization. In an individual-based organization, users have a direct relationship with the organization.

The Membership feature has profound effects on the application database and behavior when enabled, as does the option that enables nonmember accounts. Other Kavi applications installed on your organization's website can affect Kavi Members user interfaces, tool behavior and add fields or data to the database, even though they primarily draw information from Kavi Members. Kavi Members offers a rich set of configuration options that have smaller impact than those already mentioned, but each of these options may add fields to the database. The organization may also require data that isn't present in Kavi Members by default, and these fields also need to be added to the database.

The goal of setup is to create a fully functioning website, including a database that contains all the necessary fields. This doesn't mean that the organization's website can't evolve over time or be tweaked after setup, but it is good to begin with a website and database that are properly configured and ready to capture the information the organization needs to run smoothly and effectively.

Before a site can be configured properly, the organization's requirements must be well defined. Experience indicates that this isn't as straightforward a task as one might expect. Requirements are unique to each organization and therefore generally outside the scope of help documentation, but some of the key issues can be discussed here. Kavi professionals and consultants are available to lend their best practices expertise and in-depth knowledge of Kavi applications to help your organization with requirements preparation.

The first consideration is organization structure, as mentioned above. Who participates in the organization and how does the organization classify these participants? Which organization participants will be given website accounts? Are all account holders at the same basic level or is there a hierarchy? Are website accounts given to nonmembers as well as members? Will the website make any provisions for public visitors? If there are different classes of account holders, what kinds of access are appropriate for each class?

What type of organization is this and what are the organization's goals for this site? How exclusive or inclusive is the organization? Will member accounts granted to anyone who applies, are applicants screened or is membership invitation-only?

Memberships and membership processes must be comprehensively defined before they can be encoded properly in the software. Organization leaders are often surprised to find the issue more complex and nuanced than it appeared when the organization was small enough that memberships could be handled casually. Many organizations find they must open up discussions aimed at taking their membership policies to a new level of formality and refinement. It is possible to set up the site without Membership enabled, then enable it later when the organization's membership policies have been formalized. Time spent investigating the organization's options and selecting those that are the best fit for the organization will pay off in a solid set of requirements, quicker configuration, a smoother running site and less need for administrator intervention.

The amount of time it takes to configure Kavi Members depends on the complexity of the organization structure and its processes—especially whether the membership feature is enabled, whether the site needs to handle nonmembers and how extensively application forms need to be configured or customized to meet the organization's requirements.

It is possible to successfully configure a basic Kavi Members installation—capable of issuing passwords and providing controlled website access—in about thirty minutes. Complex configurations, such as those for organizations with many membership types, online application and signup processes, or an extensive set of scheduled email notifications, may take several hours to configure, even when detailed requirements are available.

New organizations that don't yet have a formally defined membership structure may benefit from a phased approach to configuration and implementation. The site can be configured simply at startup so that the organization can immediately begin to enjoy the advantages of having its own access-controlled web-based collaboration site without the need to formally define its membership structure. As the organization matures and adopts a formal membership structure, membership can be enabled and the site can be configured to support membership processes, possibly adding Kavi® Billing and Kavi® Commerce for online processing of membership fees.

Once Kavi Members configuration is fully established for a site, it requires little effort to maintain and automates many of the mundane tasks that administrators would otherwise have to perform manually, such as sending email reminders to members. Configuration options may need to be tweaked as the organization grows and changes over time, but are unlikely to require extensive reconfiguration unless the organization's structure changes dramatically.

Kavi Members is installed on all new sites by default, but if it hasn't been installed yet for some reason, a Kavi administrator can easily install it through the Zope Management Interface (ZMI).

The layout of the Super Admin menu reflects the basic order in which the application should be configured. You may be able to skip certain steps when setting up your site if the organization is new or membership is not enabled. Performing steps out of order won't harm the software in any way, except that data migration must always be done last because many configuration settings affect database structure. Remember to install and configure any other applications needed for your site, such as Kavi® Groups or Kavi Billing, so you can successfully launch a fully functioning website.

As soon as you have set the organization properties (so that email sent from the site will have the correct organization name and return email address), you can begin adding users and assigning default types to grant regular or administrative access to the website.

Kavi Members Privacy Options allow the organization to provide privacy opt-out for its members. By default these options are set so each user and company has the ability to opt-out of sharing their contact information and receiving members email. Depending on the organization's published privacy guidelines, you may need to reconfigure the privacy options. For more information, see the Configure Privacy Options page help.

Super Admins can click here to visit the Configure Privacy Options tool.

If your site doesn't offer memberships, you can skip this step.

Identify any custom fields that have not yet been added. These should be installed before email is scheduled so they will be available as email template variables. It's easiest to add these after all other configuration steps are complete, but before the final data migration step.

Scheduled email is template-based email scheduled to go out when certain kinds of events occur, such as when a company or user is added to the database. Scheduled email is such an important part of an organization's day-to-day business processes and member interaction that its worthwhile to devote some attention to the way the schedule and template text fit the organization's needs. For information and instructions, see Scheduled Email and How to Schedule Email.

This step is only applicable if your organization needs to import legacy data into the Kavi Members database. The Kavi Members Upload Data tool is used to populate the database, but the real work occurs during data file preparation, as described in the Upload Data page help and supplementary instructions.

Make sure you have added all custom fields before populating the database so that data migration can proceed smoothly. If you try to add data files with custom fields that do not yet exist in the database, the upload will fail and you will have to remove the custom fields from the data file. This data can be added later in a separate batch operation after the database has been reconfigured.