Directories in a Multi-Campus Environment Melissa Wauford, Jeanne Hermann University of Tennessee

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Directories in a Multi-Campus EnvironmentMelissa
Wauford, Jeanne HermannUniversity of Tennessee
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About UT

• Campuses in Knoxville, Memphis, Chattanooga, and
  Martin
• Research Institutes in Knoxville Tullahoma
• Satellite offices state-wide
• 44K Students 15K faculty/staff

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Environment

• Separate IT organizations at each campus
• Ongoing integration of IT organizations at
  Knoxville and Memphis
• State-wide Financial/HR system
• New SAP system implementation concurrent with
  directory development
• Separate student systems for each campus
  (Knoxville and Tullahoma integrated)

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Directory Design Goals

• Distributed directory that appears and behaves as
  a unified directory
• Permit local administrative control of campus
  sub-trees
• Uniquely identify each person state-wide
• Reflect multiple campus associations to permit
  robust authorization services at the application
  level

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Namespace Design
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Unique Identifier (NetID)

• Integrate state-wide HRIS with campus-based SIS
  data
• Must be maintained centrally
• Getting political buy-in from campuses
• Distributed local NetID assignment
• Support different longevity policies
• Staff vs. student
• Per campus

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Person Registry

• Thin registry for NetID assignment
• Name
• ID numbers (including SSN) for matching
• Web interface for campus-level lookup/update
• Batch loading of data from HRIS and SISes

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Schema Design

• person (locality attribute for office location)
• inetorgperson
• eduperson
• tneduperson (tnstudentcampus, tnemployeecampus)
• campuseduperson (campus SIS information)

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Multi-campus attributes

• l (locality)
• Office location (city)
• Differentiate Memphis employee in Knoxville from
  Knoxville employee in Memphis
• tnEmployeeCampus
• Multi-valued to reflect split appointments
• tnStudentCampus
• Multi-valued to reflect students taking classes
  at more than one campus

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Issues

• Out-of-the-box applications with limited
  authorization capabilities
• Search base methods not able to handle
  multi-campus associations
• Directory mastering
• Currently using single-mastered server move to
  multi-mastering?
• Whose data wins when loading directory from, say,
  HRIS and two campus SISes

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References

• Melissa Wauford ltmwauford_at_utk.edugt
• Jeanne Hermann ltjhermann_at_utmem.edugt
• Dewitt Latimer ltdewitt_at_utk.edugt
• tennessee.edu directory
• LDAP lookup servers - ldap.tennessee.edu
• User interface - http//www.utk.edu/ph