One of the goals of the Middleware Initiative is to simplify the administration and use of IT services and resources at the university. Establishing a single identity for each individual at the university will help to achieve this simplification. As we move forward, this will enable improvments in the delivery of university resources and services, since access to these services will be governed by a common mechanism.

The directory service that is used in the Middleware Initiative is a significant resource for applications needing access to identity information. The user id is one such piece of the identity information associated with an individual. In the future, more applications will use the directory for user identification purposes. Further, information contained in the directory will be used to determine access rights to certain information. As the university moves more resources and service delivery to the web, the use of this id will become common.

It may never be possible to achieve a truly common user id across all university systems. Within OIT supported systems, however, it is our intention to at least consolidate the name space and, wherever possible, to have all web based applications use the directory ID and directory password for login purposes. As such, all new user id's established on OIT supported systems (such as WAM, Glue, and Deans) will be consistent with the id defined in the directory.

Historically, it has been possible to establish different user id's on various OIT supported systems. An effort planned to occur during the Summer and Fall of 2002 is to consolidate the name space of WAM, Glue, Deans, and the directory. Please see the User ID Consolidation Project web pages for details on this effort.