Minor UWWI course group naming adjustment

This communication informs you of changes planned to the NETID domain.

What and When:

On this Friday 9/7, UW-IT will be renaming approximately 10000 existing course groups which are out of alignment with UW Groups Service naming.

What you need to do:

Nothing, unless you have specially hard-coded one of the affected course groups by name. This should be very rare, if at all. If you have hard-coded, then you should make adjustments so that you use the new name after Friday.

More details:

Back in 2006, there was no UW Groups Service naming policy, and course groups had no “group id” in the only customer accessible interface available at the time (GDS). UWWI invented its own group id to represent course groups. As the Groups Service has evolved, course groups names have emerged. This work brings UWWI into alignment with the course group names in the Groups service. Most UWWI customers rely on a SID underlying a course group, so a group name change doesn’t affect functionality–it only affects how GUIs display the group’s that are referenced.

In specific, the affected course groups are those which have a space character in their curriculum code. The UW Groups service doesn’t allow spaces, but UWWI has been allowing spaces in these course group names since 2006. UWWI will follow the UW Groups service practice of replacing a space in the curriculum code with a hyphen. For example:

course_2011aut-A A198A will become course_2011aut-A-A198A

This change is needed to facilitate a larger change to real-time UWWI group sync processing. When we make the switch to real-time UWWI group sync processing, all new course group names will be lowercase, but existing course groups will remain mixed case (until they are deleted, per the UW Groups course group lifecycle).

If you have any questions about this change, please send an email to help@uw.edu with “UWWI course group change” in the subject.

Thanks!

Brian Arkills

UW-IT, UWWI service technical lead