People Pages: (public) employee pages & contact

• UT employees can be found in the phone book if they have a valid contract in the HR department’s system. Employees are removed from the phone book with immediate effect when their contract is terminated.
• External members (with a guest account) can also be found in the phone book.

A profile page is automatically created for a UT employee when their personal account and email address are created in the UT account system (TAP). If the HR department already has the employee’s details, this profile will be created two weeks before the employment start date. External staff do not usually have their own URL profile page. Users simply see an overview of their contact details. However, endowed professors who are employed externally are given their own profile page, just like regular UT employees.

Guest accounts have a guest icon (the letter G) visible in the overview on the People Pages, next to their avatar (picture). On their personal profile page, next to their avatar (profile picture), they also have a flag with "Guest Staff". The profile of guests is public but can not be found in public search engines by default, like UT accounts. The holder of the guest account can decide for himself whether the profile can be found in public search engines (in the authorization tab).

This is an automated process. When employment ends, the profile page remains online for a transition period, but it can no longer be found in the address book.

• The transition period for academic staff is 1 year.
• The transition period for support staff is 1 month.

The profile details remain in the database for six months after this period, even though the profile page is offline. During this period, the profile details cannot be accessed by external users. At the end of the six months, the profile details are deleted and cannot be recovered.

The administrators of people.utwente.nl can take an employee’s profile offline earlier if requested. The employee (or the secretary’s office with the employee in the CC line) can request this by emailing the people.utwente.nl administrators at the Marketing and Communication Department (onlinemedia@utwente.nl). However, the profile cannot be kept online after the transition period, as it is automatically linked to the employee’s email address.

It is not possible to redirect your personal page to another website, as your personal page is linked to your University of Twente email address. After a certain amount of time, your email address and the URL of your personal page may be reused by the university. Your page will, however, remain online for the transition period (see previous question).

The profile details of academic staff remain available for 18 months after the contract has been terminated. The profile details of support staff remain available for 7 months after the contract has been terminated. If an employee resumes employment after this period, the original profile details will have been automatically deleted. A new profile will be created including only the basic details.

When employment is resumed, some of the settings will be restored to default. Be sure to check the settings under the ‘Privacy’ tab, as profiles pages are automatically set to be publicly available. The visibility of your contact details and profile may have changed if your role has changed.

If your profile was manually deactivated by the administrators when you left the University of Twente, it will still be deactivated when you resume employment, and will not appear online automatically. The administrators will need to manually reactivate your profile.

New people have to be added once. If you want to add someone just add a file named 'person from People Pages'. If you need to add someone else (students), then you choose the second option and fill in all information manually. If a person from People Pages is listed in your who-is-who, all information for that person will be updated automatically if something changes in People Pages (like a new photo or room number).

People who are listed in People Pages: If a persons's UT appointment stops he will stay in the who-is-who as long as his email address is working. In general, accounts are disabled one year after the appointment is terminated, but for support staff this is only one month. If you want te remove someone from the who-is-who as soon as his appointment stops, you can delete the file for that person manually in Webhare.Please note: if someone is invisble in the who-is-who because his account has been disabled, then the file is still available in WebHare. You would have to delete that file at some point. 

Manually created people: People in the who-is-who who have been created manually (students) will stay in the who-is-who until you delete them in WebHare.

Showing all the people who work in department X is not possible in practice, because many departments also want to show guests or students. It also appears that departments sometimes want to leave different people in their face books for longer than the appointment is, or want to take them out of the face books earlier (a few months before the end of their employment). Therefore, this functionality cannot be automated.

The URL of your profile page is composed as follows:

• In English: people.utwente.nl + [name of employee], e.g. people.utwente.nl/v.vangogh.
• In Dutch: personen.utwente.nl + [name of employee], e.g. personen.utwente.nl/v.vangogh.

The name of employee in the URL is the same as the part of their primary email address before the @ sign. Employees can change their primary email address at tap.utwente.nl. The URL of their personal profile will also change within 24 hours.

The URL of an employee’s profile page is determined by his or her primary email address. If an employee changes his or her email address (via tap.twente.nl) from v.vangogh@utwente.nl to vincent.vangogh@utwente.nl, this will also change in the URL of the employee’s personal page within 24 hours. The part of the email address before the @ sign determines the URL of an employee’s personal page.

Changing your email address will not cause any problems. As long as your old email address is still registered in the system as a secondary email address, and incoming emails are forwarded to the new primary email address, users who type in your old URL will automatically be forwarded to your new URL. For example, users who type in people.utwente.nl/v.vangogh will automatically be forwarded to people.utwente.nl/vincent.vangogh.

If potential website visitors type Dutch words into a search engine such as Google, the top search results will be in Dutch. For your page to be found by visitors in the Netherlands, your main details therefore need to be available in Dutch. Search engines are set to recognize languages to ensure that users only see results in a language they can read. If a personal page is only available in English, there is a high chance that the webpage will not be found by Dutch users.

Your basic page is set up automatically in Dutch. If you do not want to make your whole profile available in Dutch, include a link to your English profile in your bio to redirect visitors.

Please do not include English text on your Dutch page. Search engines do not accept webpages written in more than one language. There is a high chance that search engines will place your page much lower in the results if you include a mix of languages. There is also a chance that your profile may be blocked, as search engines sometimes block pages that include text in more than one language.

If necessary, the administrators at the Marketing and Communications Department (onlinemedia@utwente.nl) can:

• take a profile offline if the employee has left the University of Twente and does not want to be visible during the transition period. The transition period is a period of 12 months (academic staff) or 1 month (support staff) in which the employee’s email address and profile page are still activated. Please note: If a profile page is taken offline manually, it will not appear online automatically if the member of staff resumes employment more than 6 months after the transition period. For academic staff, this is a total of 18 months after the contract was terminated, and for support staff, this is a total of 7 months after the contract was terminated.
• take a profile offline if a member of staff dies while in employment at the university.
• restore default settings if a profile is used inappropriately. The information the employee has filled in will be temporarily removed, but will not be lost.

A profile can only be taken offline completely in very exceptional circumstances, partly due to legal provisions such as the Personal Data Protection Act.

Users can:

• prevent their whole profile page from appearing in search engine results by changing the settings under the ‘Authorization’ tab.
• make certain information on the page, such as working hours and the telephone number, completely invisible or only visible to internal users.
• replace personal information with general information for external users (e.g. replace their own telephone number with the telephone number of the secretary's office).

The University of Twente considers it highly important that its employees can be found online by both university users and external users when it comes to profiling them as experts in a particular field of study or being visible to fellow researchers from other universities. The people pages, which can be found via the University of Twente phone book or via search engines, contribute to the university’s online visibility and show employees in a professional light to the outside world. If they wish, employees may edit or restrict their own online visibility.

Another important aspect is the legislation regarding ancillary activities. Under the Personal Data Protection Act, the University of Twente is required to specify a professor’s ancillary activities on his or her profile. The people pages fulfil this requirement.

It is in the University of Twente’s interest as an employer to ensure that its employees can be found online. The university may therefore make general contact details and personal details such as an employee’s professional email address, telephone number and address publicly available. As not all employees want to their telephone number to be publicly available, an alternative telephone number (e.g. the telephone number of the secretary's office) can be published for external users. 

Other personal details that are classified as ‘Special personal details’ in the Dutch Personal Data Protection Act may only be published if the employee has granted his or her permission. Photographs fall under this category, and may not be displayed without prior permission from the employee.

To login, go to people.utwente.nl and use the login button (people-icon) in the upper right corner.

Generally, employees can only edit their own page. However, it is possible to authorize others to manage your profile. You may, for example, want to authorize your secretary. Log in to people.utwente.nl and go to the ‘Authorization’ tab. At the bottom of the page, you can authorize several colleagues to manage your page.

We recommend that you only log in with your own m-number. If you want to manage someone else’s page for them, they can grant you authorization by editing the settings under the ‘Authorization’ tab on their own personal page.

Please note: It is not possible to log in with more than one m-number in the same browser. You can only log in with a second m-number using incognito mode (private browsing). A login number is valid for the entire browser, and not just for one tab.

Log in to your personal page via people.utwente.nl to view all the fields and read a short summary of what you should include in each field. For further explanation, see the additional information in the user manual.

Changes are applied to your personal page (people.utwente.nl and personen.utwente.nl) immediately. Other systems that display the details of your page may not be updated in real time, as they only read out the personal page data once or twice a day. It can therefore take a number of hours before changes are applied on UT websites created in WebHare.

It is possible to redirect your old personal page. We kindly request that the secretary's office of each department submits a list of all the URLs that need to be redirected. This list can be submitted by email to onlinemedia@utwente.nl. 

Please note that this is only possible if the old profile was on WebHare, otherwise the administrators will not be able to access your old profile page to create a link.

It is not possible to download a list of employees. If you need a list of the employees of a particular department, your unit’s HR contact person can request this list from the HR department.