What is your institutions user id format policy?
We are in the process of implementing a new Identity Management system. As such this is always a good time to review one's policies and propose changes to them. As such I am curious to know how your institution generates computer ids (these ids would be the ones you use to log into e-mail, or Novell) as well as any problems you have ran into with that format.
As an example our userid format is no more then 8 characters (a limitation of some of our older Solaris machines) and is constructed from the first and last name of the user. In the case of students their ids are prefixed with the letters um. In the event of a duplicate sequence of characters we add (or replace) a number to the end. So as an example the id I had as a student was ummoor38 (I no longer have that id).
Now problems we have ran into with this format are:
1. User changes their name (marriage/divorce/because they could) and want their login id to reflect their new name
2. The character sequence although derived from their name creates an offensive word in their culture/language
3. A number sequence may have been added to the idea which is offensive in their culture
Because of the above issues we often have requests to change the users id. I would like to propose to my University an alternative userid creation format that would hopefully minimize the number of id change requests.
Anyways I look forward to your feedback.
We use 2 naming conventions:
We use 2 naming conventions: 1 for employees and 1 for students. Students are in the form of [lastname][first initial]. In the event that a name is already taken, a sequential number is appended. The max length is 8 characters. The same system is used for employees, but it's [first initial][last name].
When I attended PSU, the user format was [first initial][middle initial][last initial] followed by a sequential number. If the student did not have a middle initial, then "x" was used for the middle initial. I personally believe this format removes a lot of the issues regarding point 2 since only a *very few* offensive words are 3 letters long (from what I've seen).
Other formats I've seen institutions use are [first name].[last name], which, if the 8 character limit isn't an issue, seems like it would work very well for most students.
Student and Employee
We also use separate student and employee naming conventions. For historical reasons all names are limited to 8 characters. Students are [4 char last][first initial][last initial][2 digit counter] (e.g. smitjd01). Employees are [7 char last name][first initial] (smithj or mitchelr). Ties for employees are broken by using middle initial and/or shortening the number of characters from the last name. We will change user names on name changes (e.g. marriage/divorce) but only on request
The big problem we have with this set up is that we have one name space and a policy of one account per person, but many of our employees are former or current students, meaning that the a number of employees have a "student" user name. In other words, separate naming conventions are nice in theory, but don't work well (at least for us) in practice.
I have heard of schools who use "license plate" user names (ids based on a pattern of numbers and letters) to get around some of these issues. I am not sure what they do for email addresses, which is probably the most useful place to have a meaningful user name.
RE:
That is our problem as well. I would like a single id that could represent either student or employee, but have met some resistance on ways to achieve this.
To date that has been my proposal. What I understand is that for e-mail, an alias is setup on the server to map full name to the login id. However in my case one of the individuals does not think this would address issues surrounding letter/number combinations that are offensive in certain cultures.