Intranet Access Groups

Permission groups are used to restrict access to certain computing resources. Most of these groups are generated automatically based on a person's association with UCL, i.e. whether they are a member of staff, a student or a visitor (including sub-categories) and their associated department. This information is drawn from UPI on a nightly basis and used by processes in Information Systems that actually create and maintain the groups.

How to find the right group:

Group names are formed from a combination of department and association codes. Department codes are derived from the UCL departmental hierarchy. Associations reflect the different types of association people may have with UCL.

Please Note: You will be prompted to log in to view the links below - these pages are only visible to UCL staff.

The department makes up the group name prefix: e.g. msd-staff.

• List of departments and department codes

The association makes up the group name suffix: e.g. msd-staff

• List of suffixes for various associations

To include every member with a particular association, use one of the 'all' groups: e.g. all-staff, all-ug

• List of the ALL groups

Additional groups exist to restrict access to staff in UCL who hold particular roles. This includes Heads of Department, Deans, Departmental Administrators, Departmental Safety Officers, etc. To include everyone with a particular role, use the appropriate role group: e.g role-hod, role-dso

• List of role groups

Notes:

These links provide information on how the new Intranet groups are defined. Each group has two parts:

• Prefix - either "all" or a department code
• Suffix - the type of user included in the group

Prefixes are hierarchical - in the same way as the organisation hierarchy - so granting access to medicine-staff covers access to all sub-units under the Dept of Medicine.

The "all" prefix is used to limit access to all members of a particular type of user: e.g. all-staff, all-hon or every user in a specified department: all-greek

Examples and Questions:

Old and New Groups:

Restricting access to staff in Dept of Biology:

• Previously either the old group name or the new group name could be used: libserv-staff or libraryser-staff
• Now use libraryser-staff for established staff, libraryser-hon for honorary staff and libraryser-asssta for associate staff registered in the Services System. libserv- prefixed group names are now obsolete.

What's the difference between ucl-staff and all-staff?

The ucl-staff, ucl-ug and ucl-pg groups remains the same as before. The new all-staff, all-pg, all-ug groups are essentially the same but would include staff recorded in non-UCL external organisations (including, for example, students on an intercollegiate year).

Staff in the following organisations are not included in the ucl-staff group but are included in all-staff group (this is because these departments are considered as independent of the main UCL organisation hierarchy:

• UCL Students' Union
• Trade Union Office
• Royal Institute of Great Britain
• Stanmore Implants Worldwide

More Information:

Slides from a brief presentation explaining more about the Intranet groups, UPI and the changes detailed above can be found below:

• Intranet Permissions (170KB Microsoft PowerPoint presentation).
• Intranet Permissions (70KB Adobe PDF format)

Technical Notes:

There is no easy way to check which users are members of which groups. For technical users, a brief guide to finding group membership by querying the UCL LDAP service (PDF 225KB).