1. Source Data - the University Card

OUCS uses the University Card as the primary source of information about people in the University and from it determines entitlement to services. A copy is taken of certain fields of the University Card database each night. The fields of the card data that are used for this are:

  • card record identifier
  • family name
  • personal name
  • dept
  • college
  • status
  • barcode
  • date of birth
  • course or department code
  • start date of first card
  • completion date of current card

From this, OUCS creates a Single-Sign-on account for all eligible people. For units who don't run their own mailers, this will also give access to their email account and we generate an email address to go with it for each affiliation. See Computing entitlements for what facilities we give which status.

Account information and an Activation Code is put in the internal mail. For staff this is sent to the Department, if there is one, and to the College for students. Undergraduates have the College on their cards and a Course name- they have the course code in the dept field. A table is maintained of a mapping between the 'department' field code (including the course for students) and Units in the Registration database and between Course code and Course name.

The items of information that OUCS are responsible for are:
  • Single sign on account for all qualifying Card holders.
  • Email addresses for the Units for whom OUCS handle mail

On Card renewal,

  • existing accounts are automatically extended to the new Card completion date
  • a primary SSO username is created or resurrected if none is current.
  • status and affiliations are updated
  • new email address are created for the new affiliations
  • new email addresses are created for name changes
  • old affiliations and old names in email addresses are set to expire in 2 months
On Card expiry,
  • access to all accounts is stopped
  • email addresses will work for a further 2 months if forwarding or vacation is set
  • accounts cannot be extended unless the University Card is updated. OUCS are no longer able to extend accounts beyond Card expiry, because of the need to restrict access to site licenced resources which have legal restrictions. (A short extensions of a few days may be possible- to say retrieve old mail.)
  • email addresses which are routed elsewhere, can be extended at the request of IT support, for up to 6 months.

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