
||User Correlation
||
||   Background: We have a large, diverse user community at HMS and its
||   affiliated institutions. Users often have multiple e-mail addresses
||   either at different institutions or departments within institutions
||   that do not use centralized services. Our systems of record do not
||   always reflect the address the user considers primary, and users may
||   use different e-mail addresses at different times, even within a
||   single support incident. For example, a user may send mail from their
||   work computer as firstname@hms.harvard.edu, but when they use Outlook
||   Web Access at home, they send mail as
||   firstname_lastname@hms.harvard.edu.
||
||   Since RT uses the e-mail address as the primary identifier for a user,
||   we need some way to correlate different e-mail addresses as belonging
||   to a single individual. For example, we would like internal staff to
||   be able to easily search for all tickets from a given user, and would
||   also like to make sure that the Self Service interface to RT includes
||   all of a user's tickets.
||
||   We will work with maintainers of local systems of record and e-mail
||   infrastructure to develop a mechanism to rationalize e-mail addresses
||   to our centralized eCommons credential. (eCommons is the HMS intranet
||   and it uses our Active Directory domain's credentials; these
||   credentials are most often referred to as "eCommons IDs".)
||
||   Proposed work: We have considered several options that would address
||   our needs. We realize that this would be a generally useful solution,
||   so we are interested in funding development of a feature or behavior
||   change that would become part of the stock RT code. We believe one or
||   a combination of the following options might be viable:
||
||     * A "merge user" feature. Similar to the "merge ticket" feature,
||       this would allow an internal RT user to manually indicate that two
||       users are the same individual. It would be critical to have some
||       way of undoing this, either through "unmerging" or deleting an
||       e-mail address from a given user, in case a mistake is made. This
||       seems like it would only be useful if a user could have multiple
||       associated e-mail addresses.
||
||     * A "link user" feature. Multiple users could somehow be "linked" so
||       that RT recognized them as one individual for notification and
||       access control purposes.
||
||   There may be other options -- we'd be interested in a proposal for a
||   specific solution.

Adding multiple email addresses for one user seems to be the most sane way
to do this.  Each user would have a primary address and some number of secondary addresses.

If you actually have a way to turn any given address into a single, canonicalized address for a specific user, we can make RT do this resolution on the fly when a user logs in or attempts to create a ticket. 

User corellation

    ecommons id (active directory)

    new tool to merge users based on lookup in webservice
    new tool to one-off merge users

