Before a Birthright Email account can be created, there must be an initialized AD and Azure AD user object and an Email alias must have been reserved, but each of these have their own requirements. Five years ago when the code was being written, none of the prerequisites could be assumed. Therefore, the processing starts at the beginning (“Has this identity been assigned a Netid?”) and checks each item prerequisite in logical order. When every requirement is met, the account is created. If something has not yet been done, it skips the identity until next time.
Yale has other requirements, and many things that were originally just a prerequisite for Email are now required for other systems. Over time, most of this preprocessing is now done by other systems:
Originally the strategic way to coordinate identity services (to reserve a Netid or Email Alias or populate directory information) was to code the logic in Oracle stored procedures in ACS1. Birthright Email reused the existing logic that had previously performed these functions. However, HR was no longer using Oracle and ACS1 was being populated by Talend jobs just to maintain compatibility. Over time we are replacing old stored procedures with new code. Specifically, the logic to select a new Email Alias is now written in Java and runs in IIQ. This depends on Sources of Identity and IDR, which removes the prerequisite for an entry in the ACS1 People File.
The “Email Alias” (firstname.lastname) has become the primary identifier to authenticate through Azure whether you use Email or not. Since it is no longer conditioned on needing Email, it is now assigned when the Netid is also created in the Identity Management IIQ.
O365 licenses cannot be assigned until each The Netid and Email Alias are now created by Java code in the Identity Management IIQ instead of Oracle stored procedure calls. In both cases uniqueness of the identifier is guaranteed by a unique key constraint on the database table, with a retry for another identifier if an error indicates a duplicate value.
There is a rule that an O365 account cannot be created until the Azure AD User is assigned a region in the world where data is to be stored. Originally Birthright processing was the only code that assigned licenses, so it had to store “US” as the region. We reconfigured the Azure AD Connector (“directory synchronization”) to set this value when the Azure User is created(of the world) in which to store the mail. The Windows AD Connector was changed to set the region of all users to “US” when the Azure AD User object is first created from the Local AD object.
O365 Licenses are now assigned by “group-based provisioning” managed by Grouper.
The Email Provisioning IIQ previously only aggregated IDRIdentities with affiliations granting them creates identities from a view on the IDRIdentities. Originally that view only included affiliations entitled to Birthright mail (STUDENT, FACULTY, STAFF, and EMPLOYEE). However, when the AD Daily Updater was replaced and the same IIQ also updated mail routing fields in AD, it was necessary to aggregate everyone with an active Source of Identity or an email account. So MEMBER and AFFILIATE identities are already in its database.
As a result, most of the changes that would have been required to assign mail accounts to non-Birthright users like Sponsored Identities and Academic Affiliates has already been performed, for other reasons. These identities have already been aggregated and all the important pre-processing has already been done.
All that is required is to select some field of a table in the Staging Database to indicate that a mail account should be generated for someone with one of the non-Birthright affiliations.
These users will get an O365 account. As a result, IIQ would do the following things:
Enable-RemoteMailbox it became necessary to extend the view to include the other affiliations (MEMBER and AFFILIATE) that might have a mail account. So today there is already an Identity object in that IIQ instance for everyone who might request a mail account.
The Email Provisioning instance of IIQ still double checks each prerequisite before processing a user, its daily reports and special reporting will show a user who has entered processing and not completed. This will alert IAM personnel to investigate and find out what is wrong.
Since SI and Academic Affiliate users are now in its identity database, all that is needed for IIQ to provision mail is an indicator that a request has been made and approved. This indicator could be a column in a StagingDB table that gets aggregated, or it could be a Global Variable in the IIQ identity object. This indicator is then added to the variables examined to decide which identities should be given mail accounts.
Email Provisioning is not a Workflow triggered by an event. It processes identities that evaluate to being mail-entitled but have not yet had a mail account created (as represented by the EmailAddress variable of the identity which is set when the Primary Email Alias has a Mailbox value). If a new request is created and approved, but when it arrives at Email Provisioning the user already has an EmailAddress then the identity will not enter processing in the first place and the request will be treated as complete without any processing.
No substantial new logic is required. The new processing for MEMBER or AFFILIATE who requests mail is essentially the same as would be the case if instead that person was hired as an EMPLOYEE and received the mail account with the current processing, except that Yale may decide not to create a NoMail Eliapps account for MEMBER and AFFILIATE requests while such an account is always created for EMPLOYEEs.
Otherwise, IIQ will do two or possibly three things:
It will call Enable-RemoteMailbox on the Netid which updates the Local AD and Azure AD object, sets the UPN, mail, MailNickName, and some ProxyAddresses values in Azure.Change . This operation can fail if the Mailbox already exists, but in this case there is nothing to do.
For Birthright Entitled users IIQ would create a NoMail Eliapps account. This processing may be skipped for these new requests depending on the requirements we are given.
It will change the reserved Email Alias to have a Mailbox of netid@connect.yale.edu and an EmailTo of aliasname@yale.edu which in turn will set the Email Address in IDR and the directories.
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The UnDead
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Birthright Email processing was written to provide assign mail accounts to completely new users. It works flawlessly for anyone who gets a new AD User object that has no mail account connected to it, and any Netid that has no Eliapps account. If IAM deleted old mail when users left the university, it would work as designed.
However, we have discovered that people leave the university and once they have no active affiliation they are deleted from some Identity systems including Email Provisioning. Then they return, frequently in a different role that may require a different type of Email. Email Provisioning sees this as a new Identity, but when it goes to create a new Email account the request collides with the old undeleted Email account.
I am now going to describe what happens in general today, not just what will happen for Sponsored Identities (although they will be handled in the same way)new identities with new Netids and no prior AD or Google entries.
However, if someone loses their active affiliation and their Source of Identity, then IIQ regards them as deleted and removes them from its database. Should they return with a new source of Identity and become eligible for an Email account, they go through Birthright processing because they are a new IIQ identity. During the processing, IIQ may encounter an existing RemoteMailbox on the AD User object or an existing Google G Suite User object for the Netid.
Failing to create an account because one already exists is not an error. The user is supposed to have mail and ends up with mail, even if it is an old account. There are several possibilitiespossible results:
If Even though the user previously had Emaillost affiliation, the mail account still exists, and the Email Alias still points to it (that is, the only thing that was lost was a temporary lack of Affiliation or SOI, then Birthright sees an existing Email Address and decides there is nothing to do.
If the user had an Eliapps mail account that still exists in Google, but which is no longer referenced by a Primary Email Alias (which should not occur) and therefore does not appear to be active, and they now have an affiliation that gets O365 mail, then a new O365 mailbox is created and the Alias points to it. If they now have an affiliation that gets Eliapps mail, IIQ attempts to create the Eliapps account but that fails because one already exists. We ignore this type of error and the old account becomes active again.
If the user had O365 mail and the account remained active but the Email Alias was deleted (which again should not have happened) then the account is still active. Now that Exchange Online processes all incoming mail, the Alias is no longer used to deliver mail to an O365 mailbox. Nor can this be changed. If Birthright processing were to try and create an Eliapps mail account, and even set the Primary Alias to point to “bulldogs”, then O365 mailbox would still get all the mail from Exchange Online.
If the user was gone long enough to go through the deprovisioning process, then many options were set to prevent the user from receiving mail in the old account, from logging on, or from being listed in directories. This special processing has to be undone with scripts that IIQ cannot run. To address this a report is generated each morning at 8:30 listing the users who were processed for Birthright Email. The report include a flag set when someone is deprovisionedold Email account may have remained active and the user still has an Email Address. When a new affiliation is assigned to this Identity, it will not enter Birthright processing because the Email Address indicates there is no work do be done.
Without regard to the status of the mail account in O365 or Google, if the Primary Email Alias has a null Mailbox (the alias is “Reserved” rather than active) then Birthright processing begins as if the user has no mail. In some cases it will detect that a step has already been performed and skip it. In other cases it will perform a “create” operation that fails because there is already a duplicate account.
Since Birthright processing first assigns a type of mail based on affiliation, if the user is currently a student in a School that gets Eliapps, an attempt will be made to create a mail Enabled Eliapps Google account. Such an account will be named by the Primary Email Alias (firstname.lastname@yale.edu). NoMail Eliapps accounts would have been named netid@yale.edu and therefore may not be seen as a duplicate. However, now that the Mail Relays no longer exist and all incoming mail goes through Exchange Online, if the user has an O365 mailbox at all, then all mail will be delivered to O365 and the Eliapps account will never receive anything. The user will also have confusing directory entries. Exchange Online will insist that some Azure AD for Email Addresses be set to point to the UPN, which in turn is set to the Primary Email Alias. Therefore the Alias and Local AD entries will indicate Eliapps mail while the Azure AD and Exchange will indicate O365 mail. This user may now be broken and may need to be fixed by the Help Desk.
If the user should have O365 mail based on the current affiliation, then IIQ will try to do an Enable-RemoteMailbox. IIQ will then set the Email Alias Mailbox to point to O365. Exchange Online will now try to deliver incoming mail to the O365 mailbox.
When a user is explicitly deprovisioned other changes are made to an O365 or Eliapps mail account to block mail delivery. For example, there is a “Don’t accept mail from anyone except: Elvis” list. These manual blocks have to be cleared by someone running a Powershell script. IIQ generates a report every day of people it processes for Email, and one of the columns in the report flag deprovisioned users. I read the report each day and run a Powershell script on anyone it identifies as previously deprovisioned. This takes a minute or two each day but addresses the problem.
None of this is by design. The full lifecycle of user identities was never considered so what happens in an unintended consequence of how existing code behaves in situations that were not originally thought out.
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flags. This will work the same for any new SI or Affiliate people who also get processed.
The new behavior of IIQ when a request is made to assign mail to an SI will be exactly the same as its current behavior should the same person have entered Birthright processing as an employee (except that we may decide not to try and create a NoMail Eliapps account for an SI).
Changes
The 5:30 AM Sequential Task
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Enable-RemoteMailbox for anyone entitled to O365 Mail.
Create an Eliapps account (Mail or NoMail).
Although the requirement is described as “giving mail to an SI or Affiliate”, the existing code also gives a no-Mail account on the other system (O365 or Eliapps). The code would have to be changed if this new class of users is not supposed to also get a no-Mail account in the other systemWe may decide not to create an Eliapps account for this new class of manually requested SI mail users. However, to avoid creating the Eliapps account we need to create a new Role with different Entitlements, which is a slightly larger programming effort than simply allowing them to get the same NoMail Eliapps that Birthright O365 users get.
Grouper
For this to work, these new users also have to be put in a Group that will get the appropriate O365 licenses. Today this is done by Grouper. IIQ could do it, but we have decided to assign this function exclusively to Grouper.
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