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Password expiry alerts

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Learn how to inform users about password expiry.

This information relates to password security for all system users. For more in-depth documentation about Password Management, please contact your regional support desk / UK Support Desk.

About password expiry

Using Password Validation features, OLIB can be configured to expire a User's password within a given interval, e.g. 90 days. When this is in place you also need to configure one or more notices to alert the Users that their password is about to expire.

OLIB's Alerting function is used for this - a Password Expiry Alert notice is available for configuration so that an email can be sent to users whose passwords are about to expire.

The following information assumes you have already configured Alerting.

  1. Go to Alerting> Notices and search for password.
  2. A Password Expiring Notice is already provided.
  3. Create your own copy of the example notice - in the hit list, check the box for the example notice and in Other Actions select Create Close Copy to create a new record.
  4. Any original/example Notice No. is prefixed by OP. In the copy, set Notice Type to Password Expiry Alert.
  5. For a system wide generic notice, leave Location and User Categories blank.
  6. Edit the Notice Text to specify the text and punctuation you wish to include in the email.
  7. Leave Transmit Type set to To user and From Address to a valid email address, e.g. a generic address for your library.
  8. To List, CC List, BCC List would not normally be required for this Notice.
  9. Enter a Subject Line for the email and set Enabled to Yes on completion.
  10. Enter the appropriate number in Days Before Expiry.

Days Before Expiry

Enter a series of numbers, separated by commas, to indicate that the password expiry alert email should be sent repeatedly.

Example

Days Before Expiry 14,7,2

This indicates that the password expiry alert email should be sent 14 days before the password expiries and again 7 days before the password expires (if it hasn’t been reset in the meantime), and a third time 2 days before the password expires.

Series of alerts: this is where you would have more than one alert notice configured, with different Notice Text, each stating the number of days remaining before the password expires. For example, you want an alert to be sent 7 days before, saying “password expires in 7 days” and another one to be sent 4 days before, saying “password expires in 4 days”. For this workflow, you should create two separate notice records - one with 7 in Days Before Expiry, and the other with 4 in Days Before Expiry. The desired notices would be sent by email at the time specified.

Location / User Category only alerts

Location / User Category level

If you do not want a system wide alert, you can select a combination of Location and User Category:

  1. Select a Location from the drop down.
  2. Enter a semi-colon separated list of user category key IDs in User Categories, for example ;STAFF;STUDENT;

 Note: The notice cannot be configured to limit by User Category alone. The location muist be specified in order to limit by User Category. 

Location only level

  1. To send password expiry alerts to the users at just one location, select it from the Location drop down.
  2. Leave User Categories blank.

After configuration

Once the notices have been configured, the password expiry alert emails will be sent in Daystart at the appropriate times.

If a user does not reset his/her password before the password reset due date, he/she will not be able to log into OLIB Web or Folio after that date. To restore access, he/she can either use the Reset Password facility in Folio if this has been enabled, or ask a member of staff to update his/her password in OLIB Web.