This exactly why I was looking for this. As far as I can see there are two major things that People/User entities bring: ability to create notifications for them using @menion and also to use the assignment extension. The second one is most critical for me. This is exactly why I had asked the Fibery team previously about allowing “inactive” users a couple of months ago.
One of the main issues that I’ve seen with users adapting a new system is that often they need to start using the new system as well as add their content/import their information. I was hoping to build the system with a few key users, and once we had built out the main features and imported current data, then slowly enroll more people. That way, they first time they log in (or get a demo of the system), they already have notifications, mentions and assignments that they can work with.
In the absence of this feature, I’ve done exactly as @Chr1sG has done. I have created a “Contact Management” app with Contact entities that I basically use everywhere (e.g. they are attendees for meetings, assigned tasks, assigned projects, are stakeholders in projects, etc.). I have an Employee entity in the HR app, but they are also linked to the Contact entities so that I can keep employee information separate but at the same time I can get all the projects that are assigned to their Contact entity manifestation (my best attempt at modeling an owl:sameAs representation). I am currently using the name matching way of automatically linking the entities, but I think I will need to do this manually because sooner or later I’m going to have two contacts with the same name, one of whom could be an employee.
In my contact management app, I’ve also created Organization and Organizational Unit entities to better organize my contacts from various companies and departments. However, currently Fibery doesn’t really support the nesting ability to represent this (see this post). I think with large enough teams, this will eventually be a requirement for the User type too and a way of assigning permissions at a team/department level. Hopefully the UI will evolve to support this.