AGIIS User Profile Clean Up: Minor Task or Major Catastrophe?

AGIIS Update

AGIIS User Profile Clean Up: Minor Task or Major Catastrophe?

By Chris Crutchfield, AgGateway Member Services

Those of us who live in the Midwest in the United States are all too familiar with the frightening sounds of a tornado siren or an emergency alert signal coming from your TV, radio or smartphone. I experienced this fright recently as I was wrapping up a workday at home. Coming out of nowhere, I heard the emergency signal interrupt regular programming on the living room TV. Then the tornado sirens began to wail outside, and I felt my phone vibrate frantically in my pocket. I thought, “Well, it’s springtime in Kansas,” and figured I had better find out what was going on.

Watching the news coverage, I concluded I was not in danger. My hometown experienced just minor fence and roof damage in an isolated area. The weather service classified the tornado as an EF-0 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, with winds gusting up to 85 miles per hour. I’m sure those who were impacted were grateful they had only a minor clean-up effort ahead of them.

When you look at your AGIIS user profiles, what is your level of clean-up effort? Is it minor, like that of my recent spring storm? Or has an EF-5 tornado slowly churned its way through your database, creating a path of destruction that will take weeks or months to clean up?

On an annual basis in the springtime, Member Services sends a communication to all AGIIS subscriber administrators requesting they perform a “spring clean” of their user profiles in AGIIS. Here’s what we’re asking our subscribers to review.

  1. Update information: First, consider which users still access AGIIS, and update e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and system level access. For those that no longer use AGIIS, or those that have left the company, remember to inactivate these user profiles in AGIIS. (Member Services sent this reminder communication to AGIIS subscribers on February 17.)

  2. Extract frequency: Next, if you’re an AGIIS user that receives a daily, weekly, monthly or annual product extract, consider whether the extract is still needed. If not, end the extract to help free up system resources. If the extract is still needed, consider its frequency. Are you getting an extract daily, but a weekly or monthly extract would suffice? If so, update the frequency to free up system resources. (We sent this reminder on March 3.)

  3. AgGateway roster: This is also a great time to contact Member Services to review and update your AgGateway company roster, to be sure we have the right contacts for your company for AgGateway and AGIIS communications.

Certainly, your level of effort on these tasks will be determined by the number of users in your database, along with the time between your last maintenance. If it has been a while since you last performed maintenance, or if you have a large user community, you may have an EF-5 clean-up effort ahead of you. But don’t panic. If you or your organization would like help or direction to clean up your user profiles, reach out to us at Member.Services@AgGateway.org.

Hopefully, you have regularly maintained your user profiles and are faced with minimum level of spring clean-up, much like my neighbors here in Kansas.