Tired of changing your e-mail password every 180 Days? The Office of Information Technology (OIT) has heard your cries and has extended the password expiration for @UAF.edu email to 400 days from the last time it was reset.
OIT understands and empathizes with the number and complexity of UserIDs and passwords that individuals must maintain and is taking a number of steps to move UAF closer to the point where a single set of login credentials gets each person into every system of interest appropriate to their university roles.
The MyUA portal’s single sign-on environment accomplishes this to some extent. (http://myua.alaska.edu) The portal remembers your logon credentials for each program application offered within it. OIT now prefers software that can accommodate such logins external to the application itself. The idea is to point all university on-line services and applications to a specialized login management service designed to prevent digital identity theft: UA Authentication Service (aka AuthServ) https://authserve.alaska.edu. Depending on the capabilities of the program you are accessing, AuthServ will accept your student/employee id or the recently provisioned UA Username, plus your UA password.
Additional resources within the portal allow you to establish a calendar that is prepopulated with your course schedule. You can create, manage and join group homepages for clubs, affiliations and interests and use. There is also a web-based email client that can be configured to receive email from multiple accounts. Content is continually being “channelized” and added to the bucket of channels which you can add to your portal tabs. MyUA information displayed on your portal layout can be customized to fit your interests and needs truly making it YourUA. For more information check out: http://myua.alaska.edu/cp/home/loginf
These activities fall under the digital identity management program in effect across the UA System. Another step being taken is the use of MIT’s Kerberos technology for the safe storage of your password. With this service trust tokens traverse the network instead of your password and because it’s an underlying technology the entire user community will not be able to detect its introduction.
The UA Username standard was established and agreed upon by the systemwide Information Technology Council (ITC). The ITC is comprised of representatives of all the major campuses. Your UA Username is guaranteed to be unique and, therefore, must be looked up, however it does follow a convention: first initial, middle initial, lastname followed by a number for uniqueness, truncated to 30 characters. For example: Jane Elizabeth Smith might become jesmith and John Edward Smith could become jesmith2. The data comes from your legal name as recorded in UA’s central information system—SunGard Higher Education’s Banner enterprise resource planning system. This means if you change your name that a different UA Username could be generated, however, many on-line services utilize the username internal to the program and we may not be able to migrate anything to your new account identifier
Please contact the OIT Helpdesk at 450-8300 before requesting that a different UA Username be created for you. You can look up your UA Username by going to http://uaonline. alaska.edu, click login and follow the instructions to look up your ID.
For a chance to win a “GOT PASSWORDS?” T-shirt, log onto MyUA, Click on the Got Passwords link under Personal Announcements.
