Directory Terms And Definitions

Account

An account consists of a name and password used to log in to onlinepto.com. The name is generally in the form of an email address (someone@some.where), but it may be a free-form user name for a person or family with no email address.

Person

A person is used to keep track of someone's first and last name (given name and surname), nickname, email address, phone numbers, and physical address.

A person may optionally have one associated account. In contrast, an account may be associated with any number of people. You can update the personal attributes (name and contact information) of any person associated with your account.

Group

A group refers to a group of people, an optional location, and an optional type (such as a class or family). A group has members (people), and each member can have a role within the group (mother, father, child, teacher, student, chairperson, etc.).

A group may optionally have associated accounts. These accounts are granted special control over the group in some cases, such as the ability to accept or reject group membership requests.

Generic groups may be used to represent committees, clubs, teams, etc.

Class

A class is a type of group with an associated room number (generic groups already have an optional location) and grade.

Family

A family is a type of group that also has family (as opposed to individual) contact information for inclusion in the global student directory.

Families are also unique in that account access for a family group extends to all people who are members of the family. Thus, any number of parent or guardian accounts for a family have access to all personal details for all members of (people in) their family (who otherwise could only be associated with at most one account).

Parents and guardians may share an account to access their families, or they may each have their own.

A parent/guardian account may also be associated with multiple families (in the case of a divorce and remarriage with children, as one example).

Children of divorced parents are recorded as members of two separate families (one each for the mother and the father), with each parent having a separate account associated only with his or her family. Since these children are part of multiple families, they may appear multiple times in the student directory (once per published family, with each family's distinct contact information). Each parent will have access to their own personal information, their own family information, and the child's personal information, but no access to the other parent's information (except for the shared child(ren)).

See Also