Summary of new visitor categorisation.

VisitorStaff VisitorStudent

Both above will always be from upstream, i.e. in the VRS. They should always be people that are not currently active UoE staff (with HR contract, not necessarily on payroll) or currently active UoE students (on a degree programme, not necessarily here e.g. could be interrupted).

VisitorStaff is for visitors that are staff from another institution and VisitorStudent is for visitors that are students from another institution. Note however that InfHR policy is no longer to make any distinction and all visitors will generally be marked as "Official Visitor" in VRS and will fall into the VisitorStaff category, irrespective of whether they are externally staff or student. Note that our role entitlements do make a distinction which I don't think has any real meaning now InfHR do (have) not but we should now review (e.g. the former currently has ssh access to staff.ssh whereas the latter does not). The former results in the "tempvisitor" Prometheus role and the latter in the "visitingstudent" Prometheus role - in principle we should see fewer and eventually none of the latter.

Occasionally other categories appear due to mis-registration (as best as I can tell) in VRS. These get lumped into "tempvisitor". Note that Honorary staff fall under "tempvisitor" and not "staff" for Prometheus which is a change.

LocalVisitorStaff LocalVisitorStudent

We use the above categories locally when the person is a visitor to our school (and needs a DICE account) but is currently an active UoE member of staff or student in another school and not affiliated by contract, programme or course registration with our school. These are directly entered and maintained in Theon, but result in the same "tempvisitor" and "visitingstudent" roles in Prometheus.

Both above are fixed term - irrespective of actual entered end date for visit they will require pro-active continuation one year from their visit start date. This is to ensure that if during the year they stop being an active UoE member of staff or student that their local entry is dropped and an official VRS entry is made instead. In due course this constraint will be relaxed when we have a feed of "active" internal UUNs from the IDM which will allow us to entirely automate this detection process.

LocalVisitorVisitor

As above when they are a visitor to our school but already a visitor to another school - the current VRS only allows an affiliation to one unit, nor does it allow an affiliation to a unit to be ended early in order to transfer that affiliation to a different unit. These problems we believe are being addressed by the current VRS upgrade at which point after which we may be able to lose this category (an affiliation is added to our school directly in VRS). This category always results in a "tempvisitor" role in Prometheus irrespective of VRS category.

The VRS feed has some known "bugs" which mean it contains the wrong UUNs or no UUN at all in certain circumstances even though the data appears correct in VRS itself. IS will not fix this now, it will be fixed as part of the VRS upgrade project. Incorrect or missing UUN values must be entered locally in Theon as an override to the feed.

-- TimColles - 22 Oct 2014