Work related usernames vs personal usernames

Question

Hello everyone,
I'm wondering about creating accounts with job related names instead of people's names.
Example: In a school, the job of being School Principal is always there but different people may occupy that job year after year.
I would have the reflex of creating accounts with job description user name rather than a persons name.
I would do that because I figure that when a person leaves the school principal job and the next person takes it, it would be normal to give the newcomer the school principal account password so he or she can look back in time at what's been done.
It also sort of makes sense to me for file permissions, group management and other security reasons, even email directory reasons because often, the principal goes back to it's teacher job later.
Is there one or more valid reasons to (or not to) give work related accounts instead of person's name accounts ...
Or which best practice make both live together?

Answer 1

+It makes me wonder if i'm expecting too much form the server to take organizational charges.+
+After going through Server Admin, Workgroup Manager, Apple Remote Destop and utilities docs, I have the impression that the server can sufficiently organize less computer litterate people's digital life in Workgoup services like iCal, Weblogs, podcasts where everything is consistently date and time posted...+
I'm hard-pressed to find where specific files and materials are when I perform this sort of directory archeology; directory archeology being the process of "finding stuff" after somebody has departed. And some departures occur on short or no notice. Or even a death.
Sure, some of the information might be in iCal or weblogs or such. Where? It might be in local files. Where? What is it named? What's the most current version. How do I know?
Whether or not a person is computer savvy, each individual can be quite creative in their organizations and choices of tools and thinking and file naming and...
This assumes the folks involved are using the usual plethora of tools. What I generally encounter is rats-nest of Microsoft Office Word and Excel documents, OpenOffice.org, PhotoShop, or iWork documents, each of of various and unique and individual filenames, and often using various and sometimes incompatible product releases and such, and documents created in a dozen different weird little tools.
And you can't depend on computer illiteracy as a design center, either — one local 75 year old ex-schoolteacher is quite accomplished with her computers. (It would not surprise me to learn she's set up her own LAN.)
This is where you get into the infrastructure and the document storage and other such — a content management system of some sort, and the structures used to maintain and store and present and track that information. That's a level beyond (above) iCal and iPhoto and other such individualized organizational tools.
Busy folks are not necessarily neat nor fully organized, and short-timers tend not to be neat, and... and... and... And after a few reboots of a particular user rool, a shared iCal is going to be a real interesting mix. But I digress.
If you get the infrastructure and sharing tools set up, the shared environment gets away from the local directories. Individual users publish the materials out. And you (and the individuals involved) can avoid having to deal with (shared) directories.
If you publish out under the generic user account Number.One, how do you quickly know if a particular file created by Number.One when Number.One was Dawn, Don, Dan, Dan, Dan, Don, Dawn or Dave, or when it was Donna, the person that the second Dan loaned her password out to for the year to deal with the mess in the directories?
+Aren't the granularities of perms and prefs easier to apply to work-related account names than person-named account if a person holds many jobs consecutively, sometimes in parallel?+
Recognize that you could easily end up with duplicates of various of the the files in multiple accounts and directories, as folks work on projects across the various accounts they might have access to. And now you have an even bigger search target when you're looking either for data, or you're looking to clean up the storage. And the end-users end up either working under one account, or they end up searching for their own data across these accounts. And sharing (and not changing) yet more passwords.
I'd tend to use account groups here. You have an Administration group, a Student Group, and whatever other collections of individuals you might need. You might even have a Principal group with one or two members. There's a full-on Unix system underneath the hood, and Unix has been doing multi-user and multi-access distributed systems for some eons, after all.
+Is it still easier to change, let's say, a hundred person-named user accounts privs and perms yearly across all services...+
You're not going to get away from having to manage individual access. This might be changing the password, changing the groups, etc. Getting rid of stale accounts. Cleaning up disk cruft.
Given your environment, I'd tend to assume that the contents of the files would be more important, and of a far larger scale. Managing individual accounts is non-trivial as you scale upwards, but the volume of data involved in these roles and the permutations of naming and tools and storage scales up far faster.
+or is it simpler setting a new password to the work-related account name for the newly assigned principal for example?+
Do what you think is best here, of course. Were I in your situation, I'd be working to keep individual accountability central to the integrity and accountability and security of the systems, and I'd be working to provide structures and tools to allow publishing and sharing and storing data. And I'd be working to provide a way to avoid having to dig through a year of accumulated multi-individual cruft to find the current text for topic XYZZY.
If you don't have individual accountability, you can have a real problem with dealing with security breaches, audits, spam, and other such tasks. And you don't have a good way to build up a repository of shared, "organic" and "published" information within your groups, which is where I'd be headed here.
But again, this is your system — if having group accounts is the way you feel is best, it's your box and your system and your environment. You know your environment and your requirements best. But "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." You get to deal with the accounts and the data and other such, whether individually-issued, or generic.
(BTW: I wish you luck with this; I know what sorts of issues and politics can arise within schools. Being a system manager within any political environment isn't fun. You've got a tough job here.)