Student username convention

[pete]

Primary students (when of an age to have an individual account) use preferred firstname.lastname currently, since they can usually remember that. They can only email internally.

 

Secondary students have some combination of year of entry + name or year of entry + admission number.

 

I'm leaning towards retrofitting them as:

 

XX-23YYYYY(etc)

 

Where XX is school code, 23 is year of entry and YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY is the existing unique thing at a school level.

Edited November 7, 2023 by pete

[jthompson]

Our users' accounts, and therefore their email addresses, have a display name of Firstname Lastname. Anything else would get a bit chaotic, I think. Annoyingly, that means that it's also in their public Google profile, too.

 

In theory, that's not going to appear outside of whatever systems the school is using anyway, and students emailing randoms on the Internet is not really a display name issue.

[EBrooke]

Thank you everyone for your feedback, it's really good to hear from fellow colleagues in the field.

For the last couple of users I've been running the generated usernames through a profanity filter before distributing them!

 

We've got 3.5k students and this is expanding soon to around 3.7k I believe, so collisions are likely.

 

I like the idea of decoupling the username from the user's actual name because:

- Data protection is no longer a concern if usernames don't resemble personal information.

- Forces users to search the directory instead of wrongly guessing a username.

- Avoids collisions.

- More secure, people can't guess usernames/passwords as easily.

 

You've all given me some more info to allow us to decide if we'd like to change our convention or keep it as-is.

Thank you again

 

Best,

Edan

[SamanthaD]

This is staff related, but may just as easily happen for a pupil.

 

Our username formats used to be First name initial, Surname initial, year of joining (2 digits) then 3 random digits. Quite similar to what a lot of responses here are following. However we have several members of staff that have changed their name by Deed Poll, and one of these members of staff has asked to have their username changed as they don't want to be associated with that name anymore, but to do so will break so many systems that rely on that it's going to be a headache for the Service Desk to do.... Also under GDPR if they do change name you have to update your records to ensure they are correct, so this might happen to you too.

 

Needless to say now we have completely randomly assigned usernames for all new users.

[mavhc]

I am not a number! -- you will be if you keep changing your name all the time

 

Meanwhile programmers: I've never heard of people changing their name, won't bother to support that

[jthompson]

Interesting that name changes are a sticking point for some. We've documented the manual changes that we need to make whenever a name change occurs, and whilst there are a few things to do and one or two systems need an overnight sync to catch up, it's pretty painless. IMHO it's worth observing that people don't change their name if it isn't quite important to them, so.

 

We write MIS IDs and admission numbers into Active Directory when provisioning accounts, which can help a bit on this front with custom scripts that we've got going on. We either script against MIS ID, admission number or Wonde ID.

[SamanthaD]

I am not a number! -- you will be if you keep changing your name all the time

 

Meanwhile programmers: I've never heard of people changing their name, won't bother to support that

 

Haha! Still remember my service number clear as you like, over 26 years since I got it and haven't used it for 11...

[Rob_D]

Interesting that name changes are a sticking point for some. We've documented the manual changes that we need to make whenever a name change occurs, and whilst there are a few things to do and one or two systems need an overnight sync to catch up, it's pretty painless. IMHO it's worth observing that people don't change their name if it isn't quite important to them, so.

We write MIS IDs and admission numbers into Active Directory when provisioning accounts, which can help a bit on this front with custom scripts that we've got going on. We either script against MIS ID, admission number or Wonde ID.

 

The only awkward bit, is making sure the student knows when they're username is changing and what the new one will be (as we can't email or teams message them to tell them), and that's just getting them to come by the office we can make sure they can still log in.

[MartinT]

Interesting that name changes are a sticking point for some. We've documented the manual changes...

Oh, we've documented the process and that isn't the problem. The issue is the sync process around the 365 system, including things like the AD Manager field for Org charts and the account photo. These alone can take days and often weeks to resolve. Then there's all the third party connectors like Wonde, Groupcall and our access system. Finally are the various documents in OneDrive, sync'd OneNotes, Teams memberships etc. It's quite horrible so our hearts do sink every time a member of staff changes their name, and the support burden on us thereafter when they want support and there's nothing we can do to speed it up.

[mavhc]

Changing your name breaks OneDrive/OneNote/Teams shared info? Surely it uses a guid?

[MartinT]

Changing your name breaks OneDrive/OneNote/Teams shared info? Surely it uses a guid?

 

You'd think so, wouldn't you? It really does break things and we really don't like doing it.