Enterprise Directory

Need to be addressed:
Provide an accurate, authoritative, uniform source for person information

Description:
Comprehensive, up-to-date information about individuals in our community is essential for almost all of the aspects of the University's mission. Both individuals and campus computing systems need to be able to easily retrieve information about individuals and have a high degree of assurance that the information is accurate. Currently, that information is distributed in a variety of systems across campus, which makes accessing it difficult, and costs the University time in increments both large and small. Individuals needing information about their colleges, students, and faculty spend extra time to find it. Computer systems on campus that need information about people, which is almost always the case, take longer to implement and run less effectively.

The new Campus Enterprise Directory will consolidate these multiple information sources to provide an accurate, authoritative, uniform source for person information. A wide variety of attributes will be stored, from names and addresses to declared major and departmental affiliation. This information will be accessible via the industry standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) which is supported by most email clients and almost all enterprise software solutions the campus may implement in the near future. This standardization will allow much easier implementation of both off-the-shelf and internally developed software, and it will provide seamless access to information for individuals from within a variety of desktop software programs. By consolidating all data access to a single system which can serve the needs of the campus community, we will be able to better control access to this data to assure privacy to the campus community and compliance with state and federal regulations.

Notes/Status:
Services are available through the campus LDAP Directory (e.g., the directory is populated with information on people known to the central Computing Accounts service, and an access control model has been developed for the protection of sensitive information). The second phase involves group management and aspects of identity management.

IT Strategies:
I.2; II.1 [see the IT Strategic Plan (PDF) for categories]

Sponsor:
Information and Educational Technology