Shared accounts for temporary users

Michelle Harper

Good morning. I want to get some opinions on something. In my organization we hire interns every year for a fundraising event. During this event, the interns have access to look up donor phone numbers and call them. In the past, they used two shared accounts. When new interns came in, they would just reuse the same accounts. There is no way of knowing which interns logged which information because they are all just listed as Intern1 or Intern2. I am a little unsure what the best practice is on this. Should we allow them to keep using a shared account or should we make a new account for each person and then inactivate it once they leave?


In other organizations I have worked it was always a big deal to never share an login or account with another person so this practice makes me pretty uneasy. What does everyone else do?

Austen Brown

If an intern needs access to RE, they are given their own account; after their internship is over, we deactivate the account.  I like giving out individual versus shared logins because we are able to track what information they have put into the system.  

JoAnn Strommen

As dba, I wouldn't recommend shared accounts. Reasons cited already. 


I believe I do have that situation in related office that uses RE.  They have 1 work-study student each year on a work study account. So if there were issues with data I can tell from date who it would have been and if it were previous student they are already gone. So shared is not the end of the world but I would not do it if users are for same time period.