New to Campus?Update on Coming Changes in Electronic Directory Data
This document was posted on December 24, 2003. For more recent information, see the Latest Update on Coming Changes in Electronic Directory Data page.
In late November, CITES sent out an announcement concerning the change in the authoritative source for employee data from the current payroll system to the UI Integrate/Banner system which occurs at the end of December. This page is an update on what CITES is doing in response to that changeover, and the effect on the electronic directories that CITES operates (ED, LDAP, AD, and any extracts from those directories that are generated).
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New Information about CITES Electronic Directory Update
On January 7, 2004, CITES plans to begin the first major update of employee data in the Electronic Directory (ED; formerly known as PH) from Banner-derived data in Decision Support's Electronic Data Warehouse (EDW). More details on the timing of the update are described below in What This Means to You.
After analysis of the options, CITES decided that the unit code (home_dept_code) and department name (department) fields in ED will change to the new codes represented in the Legacy and New Campus/College/Department Codes conversion table.
Those who use the CITES-operated LDAP server (ldap.uiuc.edu) or campus
Active Directory (AD) should note that these unit code and unit name
changes affect both directory services. The ED field home_dept_code
is reflected in LDAP as the uiucEduHomeDeptCode
attribute and in AD as the Home_dept_code:
prefixed value in the extensionName
attribute. Similarly, the ED field department
is reflected in LDAP as the uiucEduHomeDeptName
attribute
and in AD as the department attribute.
Since we'll be carrying new values in the ED home_dept_code and department fields, these corresponding attributes in LDAP and AD will also change.
What This Means to You
The last updates of employee information in the current payroll system took place on Tuesday, December 23. Employee information was frozen until Banner went live as the authoritative source for that data on December 29. CITES will not begin the first update of ED from the new data sources before January 7. This means there will be about two weeks during which employee information does not substantially change in ED or our other directories.
Why has CITES decided to wait until at least January 7? Given the possible consequences to our customers of incorrect data resulting from conversion issues, we believe it is preferable to delay the update of ED until we are confident with the update processes and with the data.
CITES has been developing code for obtaining employee information from the EDW test system, but will not have an opportunity to do testing against the production deployment of what is called "HR/Pay" data in EDW before December 29. We anticipate enough differences between the test and production environments to be cautious about the complete reliability of our software in the production environment. We will use the first week in January to perform testing against the production system.
The additional benefit to production testing is that it allows us to determine the best time to extract data from EDW, and the length of time needed for the process to complete.
Finally, because of the changes in unit codes and department names in CITES electronic directories, some of our customers will need to deploy a modified program and/or convert their data by the time CITES completes a first update from Banner. Therefore, it is important that we provide a reasonable date, such as January 7, for those customers to finish their preparations.
Other Changes
In addition to the home_dept_code and department fields mentioned above, the source field will have some new values which identify EDW sources in place of the current payroll value. To our knowledge, the source field is only used for ED maintenance purposes and this change should not affect our customers. We do not expect significant changes in any other ED fields.
How to Find Out More
If you have any special questions or concerns that are not addressed here, please email Mike Grady at m-grady@uiuc.edu. Mike can then address widespread concerns using the CCSP mailing list.
CITES welcomes comments about our services and comments about our web site.
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Last modified January 7, 2004