Analysis and Recommendation:
All of the phone directory services available on campus include only faculty and staff. Some student information, critical to building the enterprise infrastructure, is available from the Hesiod directory used by WAM and Glue. There is no sensible approach to handling university affiliates, namely, people who are not faculty, staff, or student, but who are, none the less, a member of the campus community.
Currently, the directory services that are made available are created based on an extract of information taken from the Human Resource System (HRS). To create the comprehensive directory, information will need to be taken from HRS, the Student Information System (SIS), as well as a database of university affiliates. It is expected that the Library may wish to use this system as well for user access control purposes, in which case, a feed would be necessary from HRS and SIS of other University campuses.
There has long been a need for single campus ID number. It may be appropriate to incorporate the creation and maintenance of the new ID number support with the support for the directory service.
It will be possible to use the directory service as the information store to be used in support of E-Commerce, a Public Key Instrastructure (PKI), e-mail forwarding services, card key systems, and more. The directory may also be used to contain information about entities on campus other than people (like printers). In addition, this type of system will provide a consistent way to find information about people on campus and permit elimination of several of the existing directory services currently in use.
An effort is underway to establish a comprehensive LDAP/X.500 directory service to contain information about members of the campus population and serve as an information source for certain internet based applications. At the minimum, the proposed LDAP service will provide: