Overview

The Follow Users Smart Service lets you efficiently assign multiple users to follow others' posts in their News feeds.

New users of Appian don't automatically follow anyone by default, and they may not even know whose posts they should be following. This can delay them in using their Tempo News feeds to keep up-to-date on important business events within their organization. By using this smart service in your process model, you can assign large numbers of followers and followees with ease and efficiency.

See also: Following Users, Posting to Followers

The following is true of assignments generated by this smart service:

• Existing follower/followee assignments are not overwritten by this smart service, nor is it possible to delete existing relationships.
• Once assigned, a user must manually unfollow each user to stop following his/her posts.
• This smart service adheres to user profile visibility (see below in Permissions Needed).

See also: User Profile Visibility

Example use case

A company has just hired fifty employees, all of whom will be onboarded together. Before the onboarding, process designers use this smart service to give the new employees their own followers, and assign them to follow other important people within the organization. As a result, the new employees have on their first day of work a News feed populated by posts from the people they follow, as well as an audience for their own posts. This promotes ideal interactions for the new employees. If one of the new employees wants to unfollow a user they were assigned to by this smart service, they can do so manually.

Permissions needed

If the user this unattended node is running as (either Process Designer or Process Initiator, as configured in the Assignment tab) does not have at least view permission over each user listed in the Followers and Followees input fields, he/she cannot create the assignments. Attempting to run this smart service without the proper privileges sends an alert to process administrators and pauses the process.

Also, if a user in the Followers field does not have at least view permission over a user in the Followees field, he/she cannot see the followee's posts on Tempo, and therefore cannot be assigned as a follower.

See also: Alerts, Assignment Tab, User Profile Visibility

Properties

• Category: Social

• Icon:

• Assignment Options: Always Unattended

Configuration options

This section contains tab configuration details specific to this smart service. For more information about common configurations see the Process Node Properties page.

Data tab

Node inputs

Name	System Data Type	Required	Multiple	Description
Followers	User	X	X	In this field, you can enter the users whom you want to follow other users' posts.
Followees	User	X	X	In this field, you can enter the users whom you want to be followed by users in the Followers field.