About IU computing accounts for groups or departments

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Overview
Account creation
Get help

Overview

At Indiana University, faculty and staff members with individual computing accounts can request additional group accounts for purposes related to their teaching, research, or work at IU. For example:

A faculty member may use a group account to facilitate collaboration among students in a course, or among colleagues in a research projects.
A staff member may use a group account to collaborate with teammates or other units within a department.
A student organization (sponsored by a faculty member) may use a group account for similar collaborative purposes (see Computing accounts for IU Bloomington and IU Indianapolis student organizations).

All group or departmental accounts must have owners who are active faculty or staff members (as reported by HRMS). If the owner leaves the university or (through change of HR status) becomes ineligible to own a group account, the owned account(s) will be disabled. To ensure the continuity of group accounts, see Transfer ownership of a group or departmental account.

Notes:

See Best practices for group accounts.
Hourly employees, ACNP employees, and affiliates are not eligible to own group accounts.
Group account access should not be shared with collaborators who do not have official university affiliation.
To request a new institutional storage account, fill out the Institutional storage request form.

To log into a group account, use the group username and passphrase (set up by the account owner). To grant individuals access to your group account, you'll need to share the group username and passphrase with them. To administer your group account(s), log in using the appropriate group account credentials (not your personal username and passphrase).

Note:

In accordance with standards for access control mandated by the HIPAA Security Rule, you are not permitted to access data containing protected health information (PHI) using a group (or departmental) account. To ensure accountability and maintain appropriate levels of access control, all users must use an individual login for all work involving PHI.

Account creation

The steps for group account creation include requesting the account, the request approval, and then account creation.

Request a group account username

To set up a group account, you must first request a unique username for the account:

Go to Manage your group accounts.
Select REQUEST NEW GROUP USERNAME:.
The following page will display the current status of your group account requests. Select Request New Username.
Enter and re-enter the group username you want in the first two fields; in the "Display name:" field, enter the full name of your group. Select the campus and department associated with the group, and enter a brief description of the group's purpose.
The username must be at least three and no more than eight characters; however, the display name can be longer.

Note:

Because all email addresses will use iu.edu as the domain after the completion of the One Mail project, UITS recommends including campus information in the group username and/or display name for any new campus-specific group address. For example, consider using the two-character campus code (bl, in, co, etc.) as the first two characters of the username, and the remaining six characters to indicate the function or acronym of your unit. For the display name, indicate the campus as well as the name of the unit, unless your unit serves all campuses.
Select Submit to route your request for approval.

Create the group account

When your group account username has been approved, you can create your group's first accounts, including an ADS domain account for creating and managing other technology accounts (and logging into certain university services), and an email account:

Go to Manage your group accounts.
Select CREATE GROUP ACCOUNTS:.
If your group account request has been processed, the username you requested will be displayed. Choose Select next to the username.
Select the email options for the group account, and select Continue.
Create a passphrase for the group account and enter it in both fields. Select Create Accounts.

After your group account passphrase is set, you can request additional computing accounts for that group account. To do this, you must be logged into the group account, using the group username and passphrase. For requirements and instructions, see Get additional IU computing accounts.

Once created, the group account is immediately ready to be attached to a device using Two-Step Login (Duo) if desired or necessary. See Use Two-Step Login (Duo) with a group account.

Change group account username or display name

Group account usernames cannot be changed. If you want to change the username of a group account, you will need to request a new group account and then transfer all data to the new group account. For information on transferring data, see:

To change the display name of a group account, contact Tier 2 with the desired name change. For more information, see View and modify your personal information (such as preferred name, home address, birthday, or emergency contacts) for IU employees, groups, or affiliates.

Get help

If you need help or have a question, contact your campus Support Center or your department's local UITS support person.