Vendors and Affiliations

As we note on our Terminology page, at UT Austin an affiliationAffiliation An affiliation is an attribute which reflects, at a high level, how an individual is related to the university. At any point in time, an individual may have no defined relationship, one defined relationship, or many defined relationships with the university. For example, and individual may be a current student, a future faculty member, a former employee, or all three. is an attribute which reflects, at a high level, how an individual is related to the University. At any point in time, an individual may have no defined relationship, one defined relationship, or many defined relationships with the University. For example, and individual may be a current student, a future faculty member, a former employee, or all three.

In some case, your University contact will need you to manage an affiliation on your behalf. If that is the case, read on. Otherwise, you can return to the Vendor Guide to IAM at UT.

Affiliation Types

We have two broad categories of affiliations at UT Austin: stateful and stateless. They are differentiated by the complexity of their life cycles:

• Stateful affiliations can move between Future, Current, and Former states.
• Stateless affiliations are binary: either the affiliation is active or it is not.

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For the stateful affiliations, a record may only have one of the affiliations in the set at a time. For example, you cannot simultaneously be both a Future Student and a Current Student.

Creating New Affiliations

If a new affiliation needs to be created, it will be owned by your University contact. Business discussions will need to take place between your University contact and the IAMIAM Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a set of policies, processes, and technologies designed to ensure that the right individuals (identities) have the right access to resources within an organization. IAM involves managing and securing digital identities, controlling access to systems and data, and maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information. Team. While you may be present during those conversations, they will likely not result in any action items for your team.

Managing Affiliations

If you are asked to manage an affiliation, the IAM Team will provide you with:

• Access to a set of REST APIs to be used for affiliation management.
• Documentation for the aforementioned REST APIs.
• Codes needed in the REST APIAPI An Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. calls to identify the affiliations in question.
• Credentials to use for authenticationAuthentication Authentication is the act of determining that a person is who they claim to be. For more information, see our Concepts page. to our REST APIs.
• Non-production environments within which you may test your code.

In general, your REST API call will call an HTTP endpoint which includes the UT EIDUT EID The University of Texas Electronic Identity (UT EID or EID) is the public records identifier for principals at the university. See our Concepts page for more information. to target as a parameter in the URLURL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html, which indicates a protocol (http), a host name (www.example.com), and a file name (index.html). Also sometimes referred to as a web address..

Your call will also need to provide certain information in the body in JSON format. This information includes, but may not be limited to:

• The affiliation code. (Provided by the IAM Team, above.)
• The affiliation start date.
• The affiliation end date.
• The UT EID of the actor performing the action. (Provided by your University contact.)

If the affiliation start date is omitted, the system will use the current date and time.

If the affiliation end date is omitted, the affiliation will remain in perpetuity until updated or removed.

Managing Stateful Affiliations

If you are managing a stateful affiliation, it’s important to know that the system will generally understand what you intend to do.

For example, if you manage the Current Student affiliation and set the end date to be now, the system will automatically replace it with the Former Student affiliation.

Likewise, if a record has the Current Student affiliation and you add the Former Student affiliation, the system will automatically remove the Current Student affiliation.

In contrast, the system will not allow you to modify dates in the past. If you are adding an affiliation to a record, you cannot select a start date in the past. If you are modifying an existing affiliation record with a start date in the past, you cannot change the start date.

Contact Management

Along with management of affiliations comes the responsibility for managing contacts associated with those affiliations. Each affiliation must have designated support contacts to assist users possessing those affiliations with their UT EID. It will be up to your University contact to determine who those support contacts will be, but you may be responsible for programmatically updating that list of support contacts.

Our systems manage those support contacts in groups.

If you are asked to manage a group of support contacts programmatically, the IAM Team will provide you with:

• Access to a set of REST APIs to be used for group management.
• Documentation for the aforementioned REST APIs.
• Identifiers to uniquely identify the group to be managed.
• Non-production environments within which you may test your code.

You may re-use the credentials used for managing affiliations.

These support groups may also be managed via a web UI offered by the IAM Team known as the UT EID Administrative Services Tool. However, as is the prerogative of an IAM team, we strongly recommend programmatic management in order to automate provisioning and de-provisioning. This will provide a greater benefit to your customers.

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Go back to the Vendor Guide to IAM at UT.