We talked a little about the article for BC&C, and I will make a few
updates based on decisions we've made. I also agreed to set up a web
site for BEEF, and put the URL in the article.
JC began the festivities by mentioning a current effort to get all incoming
students e-mail addresses before they arrive here. There are many different
viewpoints, and one of the possibilities is that the addresses will be
preassigned. (Jerry) If we pre-assign, when do they agree to all the policies
they currently have to agree to? (Gordon) You could try to claim that
students agree to these policies implicitly when they accept their enrollment,
but that seems shaky. (Jerry) I hope they have to go to a web page to
agree to policies before they can activate the account. (Tom) Maybe on
that page we could give them the @Berkeley.EDU option.
Leaving students aside for the moment, we talked about faculty and staff.
There are three obvious places to put @Berkeley.EDU hooks; in the CalNet
kerberos friendly name setup, bilink (uclink and home-ip setup), and in the
LDAP directory page (where they currently manage contact info). (JC) Charles
Faulhaber is annoyed that many faculty and staff don't have e-mail addresses
published in the directory. (Lucia) The directory might be something that
eventually lives in HRMS--it's sort of HR-like. (Tom) In Peoplesoft? Don't
hold yer breath. (JC) HR might at some point make it a policy that faculty
and staff are required to have e-mail and have their address available for
mailing. We're not sure how to pronounce "Moers." (Jerry) CalMail has about
70% of addresses now, whether they're published or not.
(Lucia) We should be careful about making the CalNet friendly-name pages any
more complicated than they already are...people get very confused as it is.
(Tom) CalNet and bilink aren't primarily concerned with @Berkeley.EDU. On
those pages, maybe we should just have a checkbox ("Do you want this account
name to also be your @Berkeley.EDU mail address?") Then, on the campus
directory update page, we could have the full interface, where you can choose
between the various names you own in the uclink/socrates/calnet namespace,
or choose a different name. [There was general assent to this suggestion,
improving my overall record to 1-2].
So we then launched back into the question of process for students. If
their addresses are in the uclink/socrates/calnet name space, we don't
really need to treat them differently; they get the same options as faculty
and staff, and at the same places. The one exception would be if the campus
begins auto-generating addresses for incoming students. The committee
agreed that giving students the ability to choose a friendly name is
important. (JC suggested "self-selected" instead of "friendly" name).
So if there is a web page that a student must visit to activate the
auto-generated account, we should have a Berkeley.EDU hook there, but
it shouldn't be just a "Do you want to use this address as @Berkeley.EDU"
checkbox--it should give the student the option to self-select a different
name. Again there seemed to be agreement on this point.
We were at this point basically finished with the discussion of process,
and talked a little about technical requirements. Pei's concern is the
FTE needed to develop and run this kind of service. We will be dropping
extra work onto a number of people within IST. (Tom) IST drops extra work
onto departments all the time. (Pei) Our report should quantify the work
generated. A brief discussion turned up a few obvious areas:
* LDAP database changes (CalNet, probably)
* Web development for CalNet friendly name, bilink, and CalNet directory
interfaces
* Application development to get info from LDAP (CalNet? WSS? ASD? CCS?)
* Account administration (UAS, probably)
* Management of hardware (CCS and/or CNS)
* Postmasterish services (CCS and/or CNS)
JC suggested that further technical discussion be handled by me and Mike
Sinatra off-line, and brought to the group for approval. We will do that.
Next Monday is a holiday, and there doesn't appear to be a free meeting time
early in the week, so next week's meeting is cancelled--we will next meet
on Monday the 28th, where we will discuss the results of our technical
discussions, and begin planning our report.
-- Tom Holub (tom_holub@LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069) College of Letters & Science 249 Campbell Hall
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