Alumni Email v2.06

NOTE: This document was presented to the Alumni office on 12/10/2002. It was enthusiastically accepted.

Summary

The Carnegie Mellon graduating class of Spring 2003 will be allowed to retain their Andrew ids and continue to have access to a subset of Andrew services. These services include email and login access to some web sites, including the university portal. The current plan will offer Andrew ids to the next graduating class and then each subsequent graduating class.  Eventually Alumni Email can be expanded to include any alumnus that has ever had an Andrew id.  However, including these alumni will require significant modifications to our email infrastructure and the cost of doing so is not clear since their numbers are potentially large and process for communicating with them is unclear.

The current plan does not include alumni that have never held an Andrew id nor does it extend to graduating students that prefer to use a non-Andrew campus identity to receive email (for example SCS). Graduating students that continue with Carnegie Mellon in other degree programs or as staff or faculty are not part of this proposal since they will continue to be eligible for their Andrew accounts because of those roles. This document describes a proposal for the scope of services, requirements to receive services, a means of communicating this information to the new graduates, and some issues to be resolved before implementing alumni email.

Services

The available services include:

  1. Email mail access with a reduced mail quota.
  2. Access to the university portal
  3. Access to newsgroups
  4. Others?

These services will not be extended to alumni:

  1. Access to the Computing Services Help Desk. An email address and a voice mailbox will be available to handle problems that cannot be resolved online by the alumni themselves such as wishing to restore a deleted account or changing an Andrew identity.
  2. VPN access
  3. Dialup access
  4. Ability to register a computer on the Carnegie Mellon network
  5. Access to campus wide software
  6. Others?

Directory Requirements

The university directory (LDAP) contains demographic and other data about individuals affiliated with Carnegie Mellon.  The LDAP entry allows us to determine an individual’s access to a variety of computing services and is required in order to keep an Andrew id. Currently, the LDAP directory contains information for all Carnegie Mellon faculty and staff with active appointments and for students who are currently enrolled or eligible to enroll.  It will be necessary to add information for those in the alumni community who will be offered the new services.  LDAP data is used only for governing access to university services and for the Carnegie Mellon online directory.  An alumni can request that they not be visible in the online directory but still retain their access to other services.

Communications with Alumni

The student’s Andrew account and services will remain unchanged for 90 days after graduation.  During that time, the student should receive a communication from Alumni Relations explaining what services can be retained and what they need to do to be eligible for these services.

Responsibilities of the Graduating Student

In order to be eligible for these services, the student must:

  1. Agree to reasonable usage terms and agree to Carnegie Mellon’s abuse policy regarding computer and network usage. These terms will be available on the web.
  2. Sign up for self password resetting. Many people call the help center because they have forgotten their password and we will provide an online mechanism for alumni to request password resetting. This will require answering some questions and getting the password reset to a predetermined value. What the predetermined value is has not been decided. It may be personal information that only the individual knows selected from a list of common items (mother’s maiden name or place of birth) or the individual may be able to set it to any value they chose. The actual mechanism must balance the needs of a secure password and Carnegie Mellon’s desire not to receive many phone calls from Alumni requiring their password be set. Our current strategy for existing users is to reset passwords to their social security number.
  3. Agree to supply basic demographic information at some regular interval.  Updates to demographic information will be coordinated with the Alumni Relations Office.
  4. Indicate whether their demographic information will be displayed in the CMU online directory.  Choosing to display or suppress this information will be coordinated with the Alumni Relations Office.
  5. Agree to use the CMU web mail client   that is compatible with our email system.  We cannot guarantee any client other than our web mail client but an alumnus may choose to acquire a client themselves and use it without any support or guarantee of compatibility.
  6. Agree to reduce their email so that their quota usage is below the new limit, or agree to have their email inbox completely cleared when their quota is reset to the new limit.

If the alumnus does not supply new demographic information within the pre-determined period or does not use email or authenticate to the university portal (within e.g. 12 months), warning messages will be sent and the account will be deleted.

Issues to be Resolved

What alumni data will be used to populate the LDAP directory?

Will alumni be able to update their directory data via the MyAndrew web site?

How will updates from multiple sites be coordinated? Names and addresses can be updated in Advance by the central office, by the alumnus himself on the current alumni portal, or by staff in one of the divisions.

How and where do alumni indicate whether their demographic data can be displayed in the Carnegie Mellon directory?

When will alumni be able to access the university portal?

What portal services will be available?

When an alumnus returns to Carnegie Mellon as an enrolled student or staff member, how will their entitlements be reinstated?

Will Alumni email be checked for spam and viruses?

How will the real and continuing hardware costs for the project be funded? The real costs are $2-$10 per user per year and capacity is purchased in lots of 2000 users.

How will “warning messages” be sent? Is paper mail the only viable option?