Student Naming Convention

[Jacques]

I read the previous discussions regarding AD design and naming conventions (ended in 2006), but I am still looking for the ultimate naming convention for students:

Current Convention:
Year Group-Initial + first 4 characters of last name
eg Peter Black in Year 7 will be: Y7-PBlac

The problem (and blessing in disguise) with this approach is that we recreate ALL 1500 students every year. The blessing is that we delete all students accounts and their home directories (mp3, jpg files ) every year.

Another plus for this naming convention, is that all student home directories are listed together, and makes it easy for the Teachers to get to the correct student home directories.

Creating the new accounts is also no problem: We export all student names from SIMS to csv - using UserCommander (from SystemTools), create all account including home directories in a few minutes.

The only serious flaw here is the private share of the student Home Directories. This is a manual process after the creation of the student accounts for 1500 students!

A few limitations because we are an international school:
1. We do not have full intakes from feeder schools - we have constant flow of students, in and out, as their parents start work in the country and leave after contract completion. So year of intake does not really make sense.
2. Having Arabic names converted to English makes for some interesting spelling differences within one family. Three siblings in one family could have their last names (in their passports) spelled differently.
3. We only give personal user accounts from Year 3 and up - Lower primary students have a Registration Group (Class) account.

That should be enough info to bore everybody to death!

Any bright ideas on a better naming scheme or how to automate the private share creation??

[laserblazer]

I've adopted the policy of the High School we feed in to. Theirs is entry year,lastname,first initial first name e.g.
10blogsf. We use the year they leave us so they keep the same username when they move up. I would suggest avoiding hyphens in names.

[User3204]

If you have AD, you can create an OU per yeargroup, so you don't have to have a "Y7" prefix. Although then you'd probably find that you get a lot of duplicate usernames.

You could instead, if you really want, have their year of birth as the prefix, so Year7 would be 99 (although some might be 00)

[john]

I go for this format: 08joeblo
Thats devised from the following:

• Year of entry to the school - if they come later say to Y10 or something they get the same as the rest of them in that year so its a folder per year of home drives etc
• first 3 letters of the first name EG peter is "pet"
• first 3 letters of the surname EG rathbone is rat

[Jacques]

Hi Laserblazer,
You are correct - we remove all hyphens ( - or ' and spaces) from their first and last names, then put it back in the user name!! That is one thing we should get rid of! Leaving year could be a plan - even if it is a probable leaving year, as our students come and go all the time!

[kmount]

We're simple beasts.

AB01 - Andy Black
AB02 - Anita Bloggs

etc.

Our OUs take care of our annual maintainence and as our AD is fully populated and maintained from our intranet wiping out + re-provisioning isn't a problem to us.

[Jacques]

Hi John!! Nice to hear from you!

Our school is Nursery - IB (Year 13) - entry year might be a little confusing, but I like the 3 + 3 idea from first name + last name.

It is the numeric part that is still going to be a show stopper.
I think Laserbalzer's year they will graduate is maybe workable??

[Jacques]

Hi kmount,

I would have loved to be able to go for something simple!! No Seriously!!

Problem is being in an Arabic country - halve my students have the same first name! (hence the most used name in the world) and 80% have an "AL-" or "EL-" as the first part of their last name! (eg AL-Makhoul)

Splitting them by Year group makes it significantly easier.

[Ric_]

We use <entry year>+<forename initial>+<surname> so September's year 7 will be 09JBloggs.

For our sixth form, we prefix their username with a '6' to give 609JBloggs.

Of course, these are then tidied into OUs.

I find that the kids can generally spell their names and making it full names helps to prevent duplicates (although I wish that I'd stripped out the hyphens!).

The only problem is when some mean parent names twins with the same forename initial (e.g. Jack and Jill) but this is rare and I usually just end up giving one of them a username like 09JillUpthehill.

[gaz350]

@Ric In the past 7 years we have had it happen where on 2 occassions 2 kids in the same year have the same name and toatally unrelated to each other!!! even that happens sometimes

we use yeargroup entered the school + full 1st name + surname.

although this was orginally from the days when we ran OpenLDAP and didn't cause us any problems. we sometimes run into issues when students have really long for/surnames since moving to AD.

[jcollings]

We used to use YearOfEntrySurnameInitial = 07SmithB

We have now moved to initials+admission number. We changed this so they have the same username on the VLE and the network. It also means their email addresses are fairly anonymous now where as before you knew their surname, initial and which year they were in.

[tech_guy]

Yeah, we go for year of leaving, first initial and surname - i.e. 09bent (yes, we do have a pupil with that name- foreign).

[powdarrmonkey]

Currently: just their uid, four digits
Previously: two of forename, five of surname, and year of entry, eg: joblogg08

[laserblazer]

This is the first year we have allocated passwords. I took the first 5 letters of the lastname and added a sequential digits in front 1-180 for each year. Miss Williams was not impressed with her password

Because we have used Winsuite up to now, they have simply used a drop down menu to select their username. Having to type their name and a password seems to beyond a lot of them!

[john]

Miss Williams was not impressed with her password

If Miss Williams wasn't impressed, imagine if she was called Adam Poole on my system you get the poor child being called 01adapoo imagine the fun teenagers and pre-teens have with that one!