Problem

In some customer environments, they have users coming to HipChat from Active Directory through Crowd and Crowd Local directory straight into HipChat. Often times, users need to change their email addresses and usernames due to changes of names when getting married/other reasons. There are also situations where emails and usernames need to change due to company structures through mergers and acquisitions.

If a user is either a member of a private room and/or a room admin and their username/email address is changed, this breaks their existing access. Another room admin or system admin needs to go in and reinstate their privileges. Chat history is also affected by this.

With the way HipChat Server directory integration currently works, if a username and email is changed on the directory backend at the same time, HipChat Server, upon its next sync with the directory will treat that user as a new user and de-activate their account associated with the old username / email. Thus, the customer ends up with the situation described above.

Workaround

No good ones at this time. It may be possible to change the email on the backend directory, run a sync, then change the username and run another sync, but, this introduces unnecessary administrative overhead and is not a good experience for the customer. Furthermore, depending on the directory implementation, changing the username and password separately may not always be an option, so, the user is stuck with having to make the changes, run the sync, and then go through the headache of having to re-associate their room ownerships, etc. manually through HipChat.

Suggestion

The permissions for rooms and chat history should all be tied to the users Unique ID in Active Directory, not their email addresses to maintain any relationships. This is a request to add a field to the HipChat user's information so that the Active Directory unique identifier is included as an attribute when the server syncs with an external directory.