TeamFolio Concepts
Introduction
TeamFolio is a web based application that works with your organisation's existing systems to improve ways people can make others aware of their skills, experience and knowledge. The ongoing developments now mean TeamFolio is a true enterprise skills hub, bringing together the many different sources of information in your organisation that describe your teams' skills.
To do this, TeamFolio has been designed to improve how you can:
- Search for people with specific skills or experience;
- Contact a person or a group of people you’ve found by searching for skills;
- Create and maintain a useful profile of your own or your team’s skills, expertise and experience;
- Present employee skills information from the many different systems and documents where it may be hidden.
Summary of TeamFolio Concepts
This article provides a summary of the main concepts used in TeamFolio. This is a good place to start if you've not used TeamFolio yet or if you've not seen a demo or one of the overview videos on the TeamFolio and DiscoverMe YouTube channels.
There are also more detailed articles about each of the following concepts in this documentation site.
Profiles
Every person who has a network login account in your organisation will have a TeamFolio profile. Basic information that already exists on the network for people, like their name, department or phone number, is already displayed in their TeamFolio profile.
People can easily, and significantly enhance their existing network profiles by adding skills, expertise, qualification and any other type of experience the organisation has made available when setting up TeamFolio.
Here we see a typical TeamFolio profile page for an employee:
Definitions
Definitions are the main building block in TeamFolio used for grouping together skills, experience, expertise or qualifications for a specific topic or subject matter area. Definitions are grouped together in categories (see below) on people’s profile pages. People add skills or experience entries to a definition and it is these entries, also known as fields, that people can search for in TeamFolio.
Here we see a group of definitions being displayed on a person’s profile page:
This is a closer look at the Languages & Country Experience category from the profile in the previous image. There are 4 definitions in this category. Note that different definitions can have different types of information recorded against each entry, or field.
For a more detailed look at how definitions work, you can refer to the Managing Definitions article. Note that this article is provided as guidance for administrators of TeamFolio.
Categories
As mentioned above, categories are the way definitions are grouped. This grouping allows definitions with related skills or experience areas to be displayed together on people’s profile pages as shown here:
Here we see 3 categories, each with 4 definitions.
So categories store one or more definitions, and definitions store one or more fields in a person’s profile.
View Filters
View filters are configured by TeamFolio administrators to show or hide definitions, or whole categories to different groups of users. For example, people in a specific department like Accounts might see some different definitions and/or categories to people from the Engineering department.
For a more detailed look at how view filters can be used, you can refer to the View Filters Overview article. Note that this article is provided as guidance for administrators of TeamFolio.
Templates
TeamFolio administrators can create generic skill profiles called templates. Any user can view these templates and use them to copy sets of skills from them to their own profile. Not only does this make it very easy for a person to quickly add sets of skills to their profile, it also allows the organisation to provide examples of the types of skill that a person in a specific role might have.
Templates only display categories and definitions that contain (skills) data.
For more information on templates, you can refer to the (coming soon) Configuring Templates article. Note that this article is provided as guidance for administrators of TeamFolio.
Authorisation Groups
Access to features in TeamFolio is controlled using a combination of permissions sets for groups of user accounts. We call these authorisation groups. A person’s account can be a member of one or more of these authorisation groups which are set up by a TeamFolio administrator.
For more information on templates, you can refer to the Manage Authorisation Groups article. Note that this article is provided as guidance for administrators of TeamFolio.
Taxonomy
A definition can be configured to allow users to add fields as free text typed in by the user, or as entries that are selected from a predefined list of terms. In this latter case, the predefined lists of terms are stored and managed as a taxonomy.
You can think of a taxonomy as sets of terms organised into an hierarchical list. Importantly, these pre-defined terms are specific to your organisation and the type of work that you do.
As well as making it easy for people to quickly create and update their profiles, the use of pre-defined pick list terms from a taxonomy provides consistency in the way people refer to their skills and experience.
The next article provides more detail on taxonomy and how having an organisational vocabulary is used by TeamFolio.