Re: Global account name changes

[Russell Fulton <r.fulton () AUCKLAND AC NZ>]

On 13/01/2009, at 8:57 AM, Sandford, Doug wrote:

> Have any of you entertained the idea of(or succeeded in) the process
> of changing account naming schemes? It seems for years accounts have
> been assigned to faculty, staff and students based in part on some
> piece of their name i.e., JDOE, DOE001, JOHN.DOE and so forth.
>
> It sounds painful to some and I have been tasked with posing the
> question to other institutions for suggestions, experiences, and
> potential roadblocks to success. Feel free to respond to me offline
> if you wish .

We developed a standard "Unique Public Identifier" or UPI consisting
of the first initial and the surname or first 3 letters of the surname
(which ever is shorter) followed by a three digit 'accession number'.
The original specs said that the numeric part could be expanded to
four or more digits if needed.    That was 20 years ago and gradually
everyone (meaning the faculties) have starting using them too.

The thing that has pushed the UPI to prominence here is that we
started (several years ago) to promote a centralised single signon
system based on COSIGN and a kerberos/MS Domain system that allowed a
centralised set of credentials.  This was first taken up by the
business gruops (HR, Finance, Student Services and Student academic
services) once this happened nearly everyone had to use their UPI for
something and once that happened faculties moved to using UPIs too
even if they maintained their own AD Domains.

So if you don't already have centralised credential and single sign-on
then providing this is a good way getting buy in -- there has to be
some added value.  If you already have this infrastructure, as many
institution have had for many years then it is difficult to see what
you can use to justify the cost of changing.   If you decide to go
ahead I would assume that you would need to run two systems in
parallel for quite some time (at least one semester).

Russell

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