How do you deal with duplicate users?

[gshaw]

Just looking into creating 8000 part time student user accounts at the moment and run into a little problem...

 

Because we only had accounts for our admin staff I've never come across duplicate name issues before! Having a play on my test network AD moans about the user display name and the username

 

So thought about using middle initials but not everyone here actually has one, which typically would be the group of people most likely to have duplicate names!

 

So what do I do, add a 2 or something into the middle initial box?

 

Username could then be made up with the intial e.g for Joe F Bloggs... joefbloggs

But then with a number it could be joe2bloggs, which might look a bit silly?

 

Or disregard the middle initial for the username and have joe.bloggs2 or something like that?

[localzuk]

Just stick a number on the end i'd say. Makes life easier.

[Gonk]

In fairness you can do it either way. It all depends on which is best (easiest) for you to manage.

 

I personally use the middle initial and the year that they joined the school e.g. MRHarries09 and that for the most part eliviates the duplicate name issue.

 

I use this app: Mikey Magic's Web Site - Active User Manager for Windows 2000 & 2003 Active Directory (AD) and import the data froma CSV file. with the usernames in.

 

With all the user data in the CSV, I use a few formulas to generate the usernames to import. Once thats done I filter by username to check for dupliactes. If I get the odd duplicate, I add a 2 to the username e.g. MRHarries09.

 

I think it would be possible to automate the adding of an extra digit to the username using excel.

 

If I have a chance, I'll have a play and see if I can get it working.

 

or add the subject code at the end of the username? e.g MRHarriesChem

 

Ross

Sample Username.xls

[notalot]

We come across this very rarely so we use initial.surname(year there year group started the school)

 

How are you naming the accounts? We use first 3 letter of there forename first 5 of their surname then the year their year group started (it yr 7 = 2008)

 

Works for us with 1200 students

[gshaw]

The only issue I have is that we don't have year groups as we're Adult Education so it's just one big clump of users

 

I've got Mikey Magic running as well, tested loads of programs that people suggested and it pretty much comes out on top of all the paid ones... AD Infinitum runs it close but doesn't autogenerate some fields (but does do City and Country which I could do with having filled in, current workaround is to use the WiseSoft Bulk Modifier tool).

[srochford]

You're not going to end up with elegant names, whatever you do and you're always going to get confusion because you can't just say "your username is first initial plus surname" because there are always "gotchas".

 

When I worked in FE, we just used student ID number as the username. This is (almost always!) unique and it's easy to say to a student "just look at your ID card to get your username" (they didn't get in the building without the card)

[gshaw]

Hmm but then what would the password be, basically I don't want users setting their own otherwise we'll get flooded with requests from people who don't really understand what it's all about...

 

At the moment I was gonna use the student ID as password in a similar way to how the Uni I went to for a bit did it, just a user-based string of ID numbers that you can't change.

 

Does seem a right nightmare, also gotta think whether we have to import all 8000 every week or so just to find the 50-100 new users or whether there's a cleverer way in the MIS software to do it (not SIMS so makes life a lot harder!)

[ricki]

HI

 

All our students are taken in intakes say 2009 and in gpo we create a ou for intake09. All students have a username surname first letter forename first letter surname intake year say 09.

 

It helps because you dont have to promote student accounts and from a username you can identify which year they are in at a glance.

 

Richard

[srochford]

What software are you using to manage the student records? If it's Agresso QL then I can find details of how you find the most recently created accounts. If it's not that then you should still be able to query the database and then you run a script which loops through all student records and says "have I got an account? - yes; skip to next; no - create new account"

 

We printed the username and password on the learning agreement - password defaulted to the ddmm bit of birthdate and students were encouraged to change this and something like this is the easiest way to go. Not sure about your students but we had huge numbers who were learning English; this meant you had to have something which could be easily explained.

[gshaw]

It's an MIS system called AQUA, spoke to them today to see if they can do something nifty with the new \ duplicate users. From 6300 users we had 41 dupes so not too bad considering...

 

As far as the passwords go it's looking like student for the username and probably something like srochford mentioned for password, although I see a lot of forgotten password issues coming up!

 

There's the option of the self-service reset utilities but not sure how well it would work in practice i.e. would people understand what to do?

 

There used to be a really nifty looking self serice kiosk booth gadget sold by one of the print counter companies but it seems to have disappeared now... shame as it looked really good

[User3204]

Assuming you don't have 6000 students all doing the same course, you could prefix their usernames with something that signifies their class/set/form/course.

 

So Joe Bloggs doing IT would become "IT.Joe.Bloggs", or "IT1-JBloggs", whilst the Joe Blogs doing Painting and Decorating would be "PD.Joe.Bloggs"... or whatever codes are used. Then you could continue to use their ID number as the password.

[elsiegee40]

Assuming you don't have 6000 students all doing the same course, you could prefix their usernames with something that signifies their class/set/form/course.

 

So Joe Bloggs doing IT would become "IT.Joe.Bloggs", or "IT1-JBloggs", whilst the Joe Blogs doing Painting and Decorating would be "PD.Joe.Bloggs"... or whatever codes are used. Then you could continue to use their ID number as the password.

 

My thoughts exactly - prefix their logons with their course-code.

 

That way you quickly identify students doing a particular course and are likely eliminate the duplicates.

 

These are the 2009 entry students, though... some may be doing courses lasting more than one year, so a year of entry code prefix may be neccessary too.

 

Something like YYCCCCCBloggsJ where YY is the entry year and CCCCC is the course code

 

The other alternative is to use their student number.... they'll have one allocated by the college when they started and this will be unique.

[ITGURU]

my naming system for users is:

 

1. surname initial: bloggs j

2 surname initial middle initial bloggs ja if first one already in use

3. surname forename bloggs joe if first 2 are already in use or user doesn't have a middle initial.

 

never had to use any other types to get all users on the system.