The first command that typically appears on the Administrator page is called "Adoption". This facility provides two important features. First, it allows an administrator to obtain a list of all of the registered users of this installation along with basic usage data concerning those users. Second, it enables the administrator to login as any of the users. Obviously, an administrator should exercise appropriate restraint with respect to this capability, but it is often quite useful. For example, a user may be having problems with their workspace definition facilities, and the administrator can often quickly diagnose and solve the problem by logging in as the user and making corrections to their settings on their Preferences page (as well as checking their sensor data on the Extras page.)
Figure 9.2, “ The Adoption command ” illustrates a portion of the page that results from invoking the Adoption command on a local development server with some sample users.
The Adoption command lists all of the users registered on the server by their email address, along with the first day containing sensor data from that user, the most recent day containing sensor data from that user, the total number of days in which there is sensor data of any type from that user, and finally the interval between the first and last day. Such data is quite useful for understanding adoption characteristics of your user community: what percentage of users register but never send data, what percentage of days did user send sensor data once registered, and so forth.
You can sort the table according to column by clicking on the column heading. Thus, you can order the table by email address, by order in which the users began sending sensor data, by the total number of days they sent sensor data, and so forth.
Finally, each email address is itself a link. Clicking that link logs you in as that particular user, enabling you to perform administrative activities directly within that users account.