Launch of redesigned and streamlined Athens administration site

On Thursday 27 October 2005, Eduserv Athens released a redesigned and streamlined Athens administration site. The main changes were visual, with no functional changes to the menus or their layout.

We also took the opportunity to add some new features:

• improved security for the administration site with introduction of session handling. This has enabled us to:
  • include a Logout function
  • Athens administrator accounts will now be timed out where no activity is detected within a 60 minute period
• more information on the Welcome page, including:
  • summary information about your organisation’s Athens accounts
  • a security centre, which gives information on the possible misuse of your organisation’s Athens accounts
• a brand new, interactive Help system
• a page where you can maintain support contact details for your users
• a ‘quick search’ function
• the ability to generate data files of Athens accounts based on the creation date
• shortcuts to well-used functions
• a simplified method of de-impersonation
• all lists of Athens administrator accounts now display the organisation ID where this is relevant.

There have also been some changes to the behaviour of the pages in the administrator’s site:

• if you have bookmarked pages in the administration area, the bookmarks will only work after you have logged in
• the introduction of sessions mean that clicking on the Back button will cause forms to refresh, losing any data that has been entered. As most error handling is performed within forms, this only affects a small number of pages, and we have added links to return to the form without having to use the Back button
• use of the Back button will no longer allow de-impersonation of sub-administrators
• the automatic e-mails sent when a data download file is ready for download will not have the URL of the file
• logging back in after an Athens administrator account has been timed out will return you to the Welcome page, not the page that was displayed when the account timed out
• when creating user accounts, sub-administrator accounts or permission sets, resources are no longer added by default. This is due to the increase in the number of specialist resources now available via Athens, and so the assumption that all users should automatically be given access is no longer valid
• if your organisation uses a web cache, firewall or proxy which is being bypassed to allow you to connect directly to https://admin.athens.ac.uk/admin2.php, you will need to ask your network team to also allow you to connect directly to https://auth.athensams.net/ (NB: only the domain name should be specified, as we use several IP addresses for resilience purposes)

October 2005