How do you separate emails for different roles an individual has?

I work at a university, where we have staff members who can also teach as an adjunct faculty member. We issue an account for the individual based on their name, so Joe Smith would get smithj@domain.edu. and it is up to them to sort through their mail for staff content versus adjunct content.

HR wants these individuals to have 2 accounts, one for their staff work and one for their adjunct work so the two are completely separated. One reason being that if the staff role is terminated for any reason, they shouldn't have access to their staff content, but could still continue in their adjunct role. Using the previous "Joe Smith" example they would keep their smithj@domain.edu account for staff work, and get the next iteration of our naming scheme as an additional smithjo@domain.edu for their adjunct account.

I don't want to do this for a number of reasons:

1. From a security perspective, I'd like 1 user to have 1 account
2. It takes an extra email account license (we are using Zimbra)
3. It's confusing to have two accounts that map to the same person for different roles
4. In any case, the user has that content, and can do whatever they want with it: forward to their other account, save it to disk, whatever. So if HR has dreams of keeping any staff-only information from a user when their staff employment is terminated that is a pointless battle

Some options we have thought of:

1. Create an alias and set up a persona in Zimbra - This solves the licensing issue and everything is in the same account, but is not separate in that if their staff employment is terminated they would still have access to all that stuff.
2. Different domains - having user@domain.edu and user@adjunct.domain.edu - This is still as crappy as the 2 account solution, now they are just spread across 2 domains

Has anyone else experienced a similar situation, and if so how did you deal with it?

Asked by user118258 (6,467 )
Jul 07, 2011 at 17:44