SSN Remediation is here

Woo-hoo! SSN Remediation happened over the past weekend, and we’re back up and running. I really think this is going to be a big win over the long term.

On the myUMBC side of things, there wasn’t much I needed to do. Just update my code in two places (one on the uPortal side, and another on the legacy Perl side) to go after the new “HP-ID” instead of the SSN. Then there were a few minor tweaks to some wording and input fields, and that was that.

This morning we brought all of our services back online, and turned them back loose on the masses. There were a couple hiccups:

  1. It broke PlacePro (I guess the real question here is, what doesn’t break PlacePro). Quick fix: a couple extra lines of code to pass the real SSN to PlacePro, rather than the HP-ID. Since we’re abandoning PlacePro in favor of another vendor, I doubt we’ll undertake a wholesale remediation effort with them; we’ll just cut over later this summer, and then have them wipe their database.I thought that the National Student Clearinghouse stuff would be similarly broken, but it turns out I implemented that totally separately and it appears not to be affected.
  2. I missed a couple places in the code where I was explicitly going after the socialSecurityNumber LDAP attribute, which broke a couple of things in minor ways. Another quick fix.

Other than that, things have been relatively quiet, and I’m just sitting around here waiting for the axe to fall. Keeping my fingers crossed..