Name conventions

Steven Ragatz

With multiple nationalities, and many legacy records from generations of administration, our school is needing to face defining our User name conventions more clearly,


Some examples to consider (BTW: these are all made up names, and not real people that I know):


John William Smith

Julie Ellen Hays-Henderson

Xi Tsi Wong-hu

Cai-Xu Chow Tsing

Jose Vasquez Martinez Gonzalez

Mary-Anne Pouchard


With First Name, Middle Name, Last Name considerations only, what do others do to conform to a self-imposed standard? Thanks in advance.

Brian Gray

We use BB-ID for everyone now, so the username is the email address.


For students, our format is FirstName.Lastname@domain.org. We remove spaces and substitute non-accented characters for accented characters. (This occasionally leads to dissatisfied parents because "our son is named William but we've always called him Bubba...") We include the preferred name in the name field in the Google account: William (Bubba) Smith. It's just easier to stick to one format for everyone. We occasionally have two current students with the same name. We negotiate a solution with the incoming student or parent. (It's happened fewer than 5 times in 15+ years.)


For employees, we use the first initial and last name. The new employee chan choose how they will be known on campus, and we use that name to formulate the email address.


For parents, we use whatever email address they give us.