ED Changes Occurring Tonight:
Update on Coming Changes in Electronic Directory Data

This document was posted on January 9, 2004. For more recent information, see the ED Changes Completed page.

The first update of the Electronic Directory (ED; formerly known as PH) will begin tonight at 10:30pm. ED will be in "read only"' mode until we have ensured that the update completed as expected. We estimate that to be roughly noon tomorrow, Saturday, 1/10. (ED should respond to all queries normally, but EDE and Nessie New Hire won't be able to make changes in it while in "read only" mode.)

This update will update only some of the employee fields (note that only entries in ED associated with employees are affected). In particular, we will be updating those fields where changes will be most noticed: the home_dept_code (changes for every employee) and the department name field (changes for a significant number of people in at least a small way).

The actual update will commence at about 10:30 p.m. tonight. Just before the update begins, we will remove all current home_dept_code fields so that there isn't any "intermix" of old and new codes. And in order to minimize any other changes happening to ED at the same time, and to simplify the task of ensuring that all the correct changes did indeed occur, ED will be put into "read only" mode from 10 p.m. tonight until we complete reconciliation. We estimate that to be around noon tomorrow (Saturday, 1/10). A message is being put on the Status page to that effect; we will update that page, and send an update to this list, as soon as we know more tomorrow morning.

Besides home_dept_code and department, all the name fields will be updated as necessary (name, pretty_name, first_name, middle_name, last_name, and name_suffix). Office addresses and phones will be updated sometime this next week, as we still have some problems to resolve with updating those from EDW. (And, as mentioned in the previous note on Wednesday, we will not update home_address and home_phone until we can determine a way to do that and continue to honor those employees who want that suppressed.) These subsequent updates of ED will not require "read only" mode; that is just a safety precaution for this first update. (If something truly unexpected occurs that hasn't shown up in any of our testing, we'll restore ED to its state before tonight's update.)

We will also send out a note when we expect these changes in ED to be reflected in the LDAP server and then in AD. Right now, our current expectation is that the LDAP server update would occur during the early afternoon tomorrow (Saturday, 1/10).

And, of course, please don't hesitate to contact the Operations Center if you experience any problems with querying ED, or notice anything unexpected based on what we have described above or in our previous notes. Or, if not an urgent problem, send me email at m-grady@uiuc.edu.