How to Create Test Users in Your Test Environment

Most Scilife workflows involve several roles: an author, one or more reviewers, QA, an approver. During onboarding you will want to run a complete cycle on your own, without pulling colleagues in every time. The way to do that is to create a few test users in your Test environment and log in as them.

Steps

1. In your Test environment (yourcompany-test.scilife.io), go to Settings > Users and create a new user as you normally would. See How can I create a New User?.
2. Give the user a dummy email address instead of a real one, for example test.reviewer@yourcompany.com. The address needs to look valid, but nobody has to receive mail at it.
3. Turn OFF email notifications for this user, so the system does not try to send anything to that address.
4. Send the login credentials to yourself. You will use them to log in as the test user and act in that role.

Good to know

• Do this in the Test environment only. Test has no user limit and is meant for exactly this. Do not create dummy users in Validation or Production: they would appear in your audit trail and count towards your licensed users.
• Use a consistent naming convention, such as "Test Reviewer" or "Test QA", so the accounts are easy to find later.
• In Scilife the same person can be both Reviewer and QA on a document, so one test user is often enough to move a document through its whole workflow.
• When you no longer need a test user, deactivate it rather than deleting it. See How can I deactivate a User? and What is the difference between a Deactivated User and a Deleted User?.

Note: Test users are for exploring and testing configuration. Anything you want to keep (document types, settings, templates) should still go through your business decisions and be rebuilt in Validation and Production once agreed. See The three different Scilife environments and what is each of them for?.