Corvid - Full-name Attribute

Also Known As

Implemented internally in LDAP as CN attribute

CommonName
Name
Full Name

Description

The CommonName attribute is the user's full name. There can be one, two, or many names associated with a single account.

Example

Our favorite user, Harry Bovik, currently has only one value for this attribute:

Harry Bovik

If Harry requests, however, we could add the following values:

HQ Bovik
Harrison Quasar Bovik

Note that adding such names would not affect the LocalMailAddress.

Limits

The maximum limit varies from system to system, but we generally recommend 50 ASCII characters or less. While we have some support for apostrophes and hyphens in names like:

Peter O'Toole
George Winn-Dixie

we generally can't yet handle non-ASCII characters such as those in:

Lars Ürs
Jérémie Français

This attribute's value is not guaranteed to be unique. Just as two people may have the same name, two accounts may have the same CommonName (but not the same Uid). There is currently no way to specify a preferred or primary name.

Recommended Values

For user accounts we try to keep this synchronized with information from the registrar and payroll, but we can augment that information if requested.

We encourage you to include your given or legal name, and common variations. But we strongly discourage requesting pseudonyms and vanity names. We will probably reject requests that have words that are offensive in English or a foreign language unless it is a legal name.

If you recently had your name legally changed, it is recommended that you have both your previous and current names as values for this attribute.

Your name is independent from your local email addresses. We can add or remove name values without affecting the values for your local email address. And we can add or remove email address values without affecting the values for your name attribute.

How To Change

You can have values added or removed from values of the name attribute by contacting the CMU SCS Help Desk.