Renaming accounts
From Syscore
Contents |
Background
OIT, in the past, has allowed changes in a "username" due to marriage, divorce, or transition from student to faculty or staff status. Due to the complexity of the environment, username changes have become problematic, as certain applications such as PeopleSoft and BlackBoard require extra work, and are typically used in access control lists for applications administered by others.
UMBC users have been used to using their username as their email address. This is actually currently discouraged, as UMBC's eMail and Identity Managment systems allow the selection of up to three custom email addresses per-person. People are encouraged to create an identity that is not their username and share that with the campus and external entities and migrate from thinking of the username as their "email address." The username is still what you type to log in to access your email.
Reasons and Remedies
Student → faculty/staff transition
Certain authorization-granting applications were written to examine usernames and would only grant student-level permissions to users whose username ended in a number (e.g. rbanz1). This, of course, presented a problem to those students who became faculty or staff members, and needed additional priveleges. As a result, we would have to change the username into one that did not end numerically (e.g. rbanz1 → banz)
As our account management system has evolved, authorization decisions are made based on other data, and username formats have lost their importance.
Marriage, Divorce, or Name Change
In the case of marriage, divorce, or other name change, OIT provides the ability for an individual to create up to three email addresses, which they can use and have advertised as their official UMBC email address. Users can configure their email clients, such as Outlook, Mozilla, Thunderbird or even pine to send mail so that it shows this address as their From and Reply-To addresses.
