Proper submitter, co-author, presenter & speaker identity management results in delighted end-users and smoothly operating support teams. Improper identity management results in frustrated submitters, co-authors, presenters & speakers, as well as chaotic scrambles to clean things up. We would wish for proper identity management always. Still, since even Association Management Systems (AMS) and their related services can have off days or be misconfigured, we’ve added an additional tool to help clean up the “mess on aisle 5” if it happens.
An association management system based single sign-on system (SSO), where the association is a “source of truth” for a person and all related personally identifiable information (PII) is the only GDPR approved pattern for identity management, and fortunately, a pattern that the cOASIS platform fully supports. The components include:
1) Logging into cPortal through the association’s SSO, which transfers the association’s member identity key (which we call the SSOID) to cOASIS;
2) Co-author look-up against the AMS during abstract submission, resulting in either a) a record already in the association’s AMS with the co-author’s member identity key (which is sometimes referred to as the AuthorMemberSpec, and is again the SSOID) or b) a co-author not being found, which is often configured to then allow the submitter to enter the co-author details, after which cOASIS assigns a temporary identity to the co-author;
3) A call back to the association’s AMS to resolve any temporary co-authors that have been entered manually by the submitter and update the record with the “permanent” AMS identity key for that person.
The update being made to the existing People dashboard -> Compare & Merge function contains two parts:
1. It allows cAdmin users to override the 3rd step in a properly functioning identity management process and force a Person SSOID into a co-author’s SSOID AuthorMemberSpec during a merge. This new function should not be needed, but it is now there if it is needed to help clean up a mess.
2. Photos and Bios will now merge when two Person-level records are merged according to the following rules for the “surviving Person record” and the “merged Person record”.
– If the merged Person record has a photo and/or bio AND the surviving Person record does not have a photo and/or bio, the photo and/or bio from the merged Person record will replace the blank(s) in the surviving Person record
– If the merged Person record contains a photo and/or bio AND the surviving Person record also contains a photo and/or bio, a message will be provided notifying the admin user that the surviving Person records already has one or more of these assets, allowing the user to cancel the merge and visually compare the results to determine which one to keep. If the merge is continued, the merged Person’s photo and/or bio will be removed.