ID changes

From Redmond Developer:

"If you change the way you're representing some data in your enterprise directory, all the apps that made assumptions about the shape of that data start to malfunction."
Stuart Kwan, Program Manager, Federated Identity Team, Microsoft

Unfortunately, the network team decided to start adding a new 2 digit prefix on newly created network ids, as the result of an issue regarding some duplicate ids. They are unique, but not across the entire forrest, which appears to be an issue for Safeboot as I understand it. Implementing this today would create an issue for some of our Visual Basic applications. Luckily an e-mail was sent out about the date they were going to begin implementing, so we were at least able to postpone the implementation. Now we'll have to see how much work will be required. They have since decided that besides adding the 2 digit prefix, that for some accounts they want to add a 4 digit prefix. At least we haven't started making the changes yet. Now the question is, will they decide on other changes and what other things could end up being affected somewhere down the road.

Hopefully incorporating things like Zermatt and/or CardSpace into one's development might help with situations like this down the road.

Of course, even solutions like these don't replace the need for communication and interaction between IT groups, especially when they are in the same shop.