On Designing a Database for Integrated User Management: Pitfalls and Possibilities

Decisions on implementing IT systems have often been departmental or isolated in nature. As a result many organizations now are faced with the challenge of integrating different networks and computers (in different departments or possibly even within each), each managed by a different operating system, and each running different types of applications. In the last decade all organizations have understood the importance of integrating the different systems and applications. While practitioners and researchers have proposed and implemented several methods for integrating systems, applications, and data, one area has been and continues to be difficult to integrate - user accounts.

In this paper we present an approach to integrate user account information from several systems. This approach is interesting for several reasons. First it is not specific to managing users on a particular system and is general enough to be used in an integrated environment that includes several systems of different types. Second, it is easily scalable to include applications and networks that have users and need user management. Third, it is simple and easy to understand and implement. The approach results in a database of user accounts that can be queried for specific users, groups, and so on. The design can be implemented in any relational database, or for example in the Windows 2000 Active Directory to take advantage of the fact that it already tracks user accounts and related information.