Network Development Team

Note: this post relates to a private service for University of Oxford IT Support Staff.

It’s been some time since the Visitor Network account management tool, which you use to create network access accounts for visitors to the University, has had any development. As a result we’ve built up a list of feature requests which I’m preparing to work through over the next month or so. I thought it might also be useful to poll you for more suggestions, so please feel free to add comments to this post if you have more ideas I can fold in.

Some of these changes are minor updates to the page text, others more major development, so here they all are in no particular order:

• Add a note about there being a max. of 300 accounts when bulk generating
• Add a variable number of leading zeros to auto-generated account names such that they can sort correctly in a list
• Tweak password generation rules so they don’t begin or end with a symbol (non-alphanum)
• The 14 day one-off account lifetime-limit is actually 13 days and 45 minutes
• Show/hide columns in the various tables (e.g. sponsor, purpose in the Account List)
• Have confirmation dialog boxes when deleting accounts or groups
• Send username/password to a visitor via SMS
• Fix IP accounting so we have byte counts both in and out once again
• Upload comma separated list of visitor names when bulk generating accounts (as alternative to auto-generated names)
• Download comma separated list of the account names and credentials within a custom group
• Make default start/end times for accounts more sane (e.g. start now, rather than in the future)

Note that it’s not guaranteed we’ll manage to implement all of the above, particularly the column show/hide one which I suppose will need some Javascript.

I’m particularly interested in the ability to SMS credentials to the visitor. This would be helpful (1) if you have to set the account up for someone over the telephone, and (2) for PDA/smartphone users who would prefer to copy/paste than enter text. I’ve done some basic tests with the new OxSMS service from the Telecoms team and I think we’ll be able to do this quite easily. We could perhaps offer either to send the SMS immediately, or say one hour before the account is due to become active.

So, if you have any more suggestions to add to the above list, please either leave a comment below, or email us at networks@oucs.ox.ac.uk.