Identity Management at Waterloo

Isaac Morland

What is Identity?

What am I actually talking about, anyway?

What Makes a Good Identifier?

• Unique• Short• Permanent

An Example• Student schedule with instructor contact

information and office hours• Authenticate — userid• Look up classes — UW ID• Find instructors• Look up office hours — HR ID

What About Instructors?• Instructor schedule allowing instructors to

edit their office hour information• Authenticate — userid• Look up classes• Look up existing office hours — HR ID• Allow editing

Multiple Identifiers• Userid• UW ID• HR ID

One More Feature• Store preferences• Index by UW ID or by HR ID?• Are there other choices?

Telephone Services• Assigns Telephone Services ID• Based on HR ID for employees• Different number range for others• Another space for non-personal phones

WatCard• Assigns WatCard ID• Same as UW ID for students• Different number range for staff, etc.• Another range for departmental charging• Also assigns Library barcode

Library• Voyager assigns internal Patron ID• Barcodes outsourced to WatCard• Auto-update from WatCard via Quest• Some have more than one barcode

Registrar (Quest)• Assigns UW ID• Formerly from OUAC ID• Now sequential from 20060000

Human Resources• Assigns employee number

WatIAM• Assigns database identifier• Also assigns userid• Tries to have one account per person• Also lots of non-person accounts

Lots of Identifiers• Telephone Services• WatCard• Library• Registrar (Quest)• Human Resources• WatIAM• Do any of these work for my example?

NO!NO!

Required Solution Features• Comprehensive• Stable Identifiers

I Haven’t Mentioned…• Active Directory• Employee recruitment• Alumni• Duplicate avoidance and correction

Thanks to …• John Cunningham (WatCard)• Sean Mason (WatIAM)• Joe Allen (Telephone Services)• Alex McCulloch (Library)