Mandate
In November 2003, the NAAUG Enhancement Group Chairs met with Carmit Marcus, Ex Libris’ Director of Development, to review the year’s NAAUG enhancements.

At the meeting, Carmit promised to look into the Aleph “permissions”, that is staff security, acknowledging that this part of the Aleph administration had more problems that could be solved via the enhancement request process.

At the meeting of the NAAUG Steering Committee with Ex Libris at ALA Mid-winter, Ex Libris asked NAAUG to provide them with a “functional document” regarding staff permissions in Aleph – listing the functionality sites would like to see in a new tool for managing staff securities.

The Steering Committee decided to strike a small NAAUG working group to develop this functional document.

The ALEPH Staff Permission Working Group produced a Functional Requirement Document which covers the problems with the current system and the requirements for the new ALEPH Permission System.

In response to this document, the following changes are planned for Version 18:

1. New fields will be added to the users record (Z66) – Name, Department, Notes, Email, Address, Telephone, Expiration Date, Last Alert Date, Blocked, Block Reason
2. New password related policies may be implemented (depending on the setup chosen by a specific customer):
a) minimum length of password
b) password should contain a combination of alpha and numeric values.
c) three failed login attempts will automatically lock the user.
d) password not used during a specified period will be locked.
e) password should be changed after first login of new users.
f) system requires a periodical password change.
Beyond these immediate changes, the document called for Ex Libris to implement a new task-oriented permission mechanism in order to simplify the process of permission assignment and at the same time to provide the required permission granularity. Toward that end, Carmit Marcus asked the NAAUG Steering Committee to charge a group of ALEPH users to work with their system analyst in order to determine the required Roles needed by the libraries, and discuss upgradeability from the current Staff Permission into the new one. The goal is to incorporate these features in Version 19.

Members:
Ms. Lim-Ek Ben Wai, Temasek Polytechnic Library, Singapore, ICAU representative
Leon Krauthausen, Universitätsbibliothek der FU Berlin, IGELU representative
Daniel Cromwell FCLA (Florida Center for Library Automation)
Cindy Fox CCLA (College Center for Library Automation, Florida)
Gary Johnson SDLN
Sue Julich, University of Iowa,
David Kennedy, University of Maryland (Chair)
Laura Morse, Harvard University

You may send comments to the Chair, Sue Julich.