A recent change to the authentication system for E2Campus means that all members of the UMBC community need to re-register for emergency campus text messages. If you registered your phone prior to August 26, 2009 you MUST login through myUMBC under your personal profile and notifications or directly at:
https://my.umbc.edu/personal/notifications/
Users who have not re-registered by October 31, 2009 will no longer receive UMBC alerts.
FAQs
I already registered for E2Campus, can I migrate my old account?
Unfortunately, existing accounts cannot be migrated. All existing users will need to re-register with E2Campus. Since we now know who the person is relative to UMBC's identity management system we will not need to do future re-registrations.
How long before my existing E2Campus account is deleted?
Existing E2Campus accounts will remain functional through October 31, 2009. UMBC will purge the old accounts after this date, thus leaving the new accounts in place.
If I re-register now will I get two text messages sent to my phone?
Users that have re-registered but still have an old account (i.e. until Oct 31st) will not receive duplicate text messages. E2campus can tell if the same phone number is in their system for more than one account, and will only send one message to that phone number. After October 31, 2009, old UMBC accounts that have the same phone number as new accounts will be deleted.
Why is UMBC changing the system?
Background:
E2Campus was initially setup to use external, non-UMBC accounts. This meant that users had to create a user name and password that was hosted at E2Campus. This presented a few challenges for UMBC.
-There was no way to know a user’s affiliation (Faculty, Staff or Student)
-We can't tell if a user is still affiliated with the university (e.g. graduated, quit, terminated etc.)
-Users forgot both user name and password but UMBC DoIT Help Desk could not assist.
Solution:
DoIT worked with E2Campus to be the first campus nationally to use the Shibboleth authentication standard to provide single sign on (SSO) ability. This means that users will no longer need to create an external account with E2campus. Instead UMBC is the identity provider and passes this information to E2Campus.
Benefits of New Authentication System:
- We know who the person is and their affiliation (e.g. student, staff, faculty, grad student etc.)
- We know the person’s status (graduated, quit etc.)
- There is no password to remember since the login is done via SSO from myUMBC.
- We can purge/delete old accounts of people who have left the University