[CompInaBox-discuss] User "types" -- personal and functional

[Eric D N. <nie...@MI...>]

In the past all "types" of users were shoehorned into the same class.
All users had a username, password, and a linked person (who has at least a
primary email).

However, a lot of teams use a functional account for their group registration --
ie the account is shared by mutliple team officers -- so the linked "person"
often ending up being (firstname: Brown; lastname: Ballroom; email:
officer_email@...),  Rather than having each officer create an individual
account and then grant appropriate permissions down the chain, the functional
account is labelled as a "Team Captain" with full rights over their team.  As
officers come and go, there isn't a need for yearly/semesterly grant/revoke
(thought some teams might need to worry about password changes to keep possibly
disaffected ex-officers from causing problems, of course).

As I'm currently working on the user-based registration process now, I wanted to
re-examine this.  Some questions:

1) I'm  planning to create a class hierarchy for users
(User<-[Personal|Functional]) so that functional accounts aren't forced into
having first and last names, etc.  Any reasons not to?

2) Are there other different types of accounts that I should consider (note, not
different access levels that's an independent axis that I think I have well
under control).

3) Is there a better name for the personal v. functional account that is likely
to be easily understandable? personal v shared?  With my previous military
experience and work in matrixed organizations, functional makes total sense to
me, but I don't know if its clear to others....

Thanks,

Eric