Creating User Accounts

Once Synchronize is installed, you should edit the db/users file with a text editor and enter the names of the users who will be using Synchronize. User names can be entered in any order and sorted by the Administrator for convenience. The order in which names appear in the users file is the order in which they will be presented to users. Entries should be added with the following format:

Synchronize_name, login_name, e-mail_address, Synchronize_alias

The above fields are defined as follows:

Synchronize_name

This field is the user’s Synchronize name. It is mandatory and must also be unique within the database. Once entered and used, this field must never change. If it changes, Synchronize will not be able to find the calendar items for that user and all entries for that user will have been lost. Use the optional Synchronize_alias field (see below) to change a Synchronize user’s name once it has been established.

login_name

This field is required for all Synchronize users and should be unique within the local database. This field should be left blank for "non-human" resources like conference rooms. For UNIX users, this field contains their unique UNIX login. For non-UNIX users, this field can be anything (i.e., non-UNIX users do not need to have a UNIX login to run Synchronize). This field can be changed at any time to reflect a new login.

e-mail_address

This field is optional, and is used to designate an e-mail address for the user. If this field is omitted, then the login_name will be used by default as the e-mail address. This field is typically necessary when the e-mail system needs more information than just the login_name to route e-mail correctly. If the Synchronize server is running on a Windows NT host, then you may optionally prefix the user’s address with MAPI:. Doing so indicates that any e-mail to this user must be sent specifically through the MAPI system.

Synchronize_alias

This field is optional, and determines how the user’s name will be displayed within Synchronize. If this field is omitted, then the Synchronize_name is used by default. This field can be used or modified, for example, when a user changes his or her name due to marriage. To avoid confusion, it is suggested that you not use a name that conflicts with another local Synchronize_name or Synchronize_alias, although this is not strictly required.

Fields (including blank fields) must be separated by commas. Any extra white space before or after a comma is optional and will be ignored. If a particular field contains a comma, then you must surround the entire field with double quotation marks so that the comma will not be interpreted as a field separator. You should take care to hit Return or Enter at the end of the last line in the file. Most of the time it will not be a problem, but some text editors fail to automatically include an end-of-line character before the end-of-file thereby causing the last line to be ignored. Here is an example of entries in the db/users file:

Joe, jclark, , Joey
+Larry,lsmith,lsmith@mantle,
Rhonda, rjones, , Rhonda Jones
"Karlsen, Jim", jkarlsen,,Jim
Joseph, joe,, Joe
Conference Room A,,,
Slide Projector

Note: The leading "+" for Larry indicates that he is a Synchronize administrator. See the Designating a Synchronize Administrator section for details.