[BBLISA] Enterprise user account naming standards?

[John Stoffel]

>>>>> "Bruce" == Bruce Davis <ayden at mixolydian.org> writes:

Bruce> My questions to all of you: What user account naming standard
Bruce> do you use?  How do you make sure each user name is unique?
Bruce> How well does your user account naming standard scale?  If you
Bruce> had to change user account names to a new standard, how was
Bruce> user acceptance?

I would set things up along the Lucent model, where everyone was
assigned a unique "handle" by the HR dept when you arrived at the
company.  This made life simple for the IT folks, since they just had
to use that handle (if they wanted) as the username on systems.  

If HR allows some flexibilty in the choosing of handles, and some
process to request a change, then most users are happy.  Getting this
into the hands of HR solves a whole bunch of problems and issues:

- pissing contests between Unix and Windows, or
- possing contests between external email and internal usernames,
- inconsistency between Windows and Unix usernames,
- a company wide standard which is enforced at the level of the people
  who write the paychecks.  Don't underestimate this!

- The basic algorithm was <first_name_initial><lastname> upto seven
  characters of the last night.  If your last name was eight
  characters, and available, you got that.  So I became 'jstoffel' at
  first, but was able to change it to 'stoffel' without a problem.
  'john' was already taken.  :]

- If there were conflicts, such a 'jsmith', they would either stick a
  middle initial in there, so you could have 'jsmith' and 'jesmith' as
  two handles, or they would put numbers after names.  

Ideally you want to try and get away from the silly
"first_last at corp.com" external email naming conventions, since they
just don't scale.  Lucent did a nice job with this by just using
handles for everything.

My current company has a bizarre standard of first_last at corp.com for
external, but internally we've got non-uniform Unix/Windows and it's
<first_five_letters_of_last_name><first_name_initial> so I become
'stoffj' here.  Painful.

Oh yeah, part of the policy was that no handle could be re-used until
two years after it was last used, either by some one who left the
company, or by a person who changed their handle to something else.

I guess my big point here is to get the standard into the HR hiring
process, so that you're just implementing it, not setting it and
forcing people to use it.  Make it a management, not IT issue.

John