Check for duplicate email addresses and stop users being logged into the wrong account

If you've recently rolled out Arbor, the Parent Portal or Student Portal, you may have people logged into the wrong account, such as guardians being logged into a student account, or staff being logged into the Parent Portal. This often happens due to two or more profiles sharing an email address; resolving such duplicates helps prevent and resolve sign-in issues.

Before completing this process, we recommend checking to see if there are duplicate profiles and resolving them. For how to do this, see our articles for staff, guardians and students.

Permissions

Only people with the School: General Admin: Administer permission can see the notification and resolve duplicates. If you don't have permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

Why does this happen?

If a user is logging into the wrong account, their email address is likely being used on multiple profiles.

If duplicate email exists, Arbor will try to log you into accounts in this order:

1. Student Portal (if enabled)
2. Parent Portal
3. Staff

So, if a parent and child both have the same default email address listed (e.g. arbor@example.com), when someone tries to sign in with arbor@example.com, the system will think it is the child signing in, not the parent. This, in turn, is likely to lead to mismatches between the passwords for both profiles and will stop someone from signing in.

Even if two profiles of the same type, say two guardian profiles, the duplication is likely to cause issues. The reason for this is that the system will not know which guardian is signing in, making a password mismatch likely. And, if a password reset is requested for the email address, the system will not know who requested the reset, which is likely to lead to a reset of the wrong account's password, further confounding the password mismatch.

Use the instructions below to check if the email address someone is trying to log in with has also been used on another student, staff or duplicate guardian's profile. If it has, you'll need to change or delete the email on one of the profiles so the system will know which account to log into.

Identifying duplicate email addresses

How many duplicates do we have?

You can see a count of all duplicates in the Unresolved Suspected Duplicates table of the School > Data > Data Quality > Dashboard page. 

Clicking on any of the listed items, like Email, will take you to the resolution page for those duplicates.

Staff with the School: General Admin: Administer permission can also see a count of how many of the duplicates will cause login issues for staff on your homepage, in your To Do list - clicking this will also take you to the resolution page.

Refer to School > Data > Data Quality > Suspected Duplicates > Email Addresses for an overview of duplicate email addresses. This page lists email addresses assigned to multiple staff, guardians, or student profiles.

Staff - Duplicated email addresses can cause login issues for staff on Arbor. These must be resolved.

Guardians - Duplicates may hinder guardians from logging into the Arbor Parent Portal or resetting passwords.

Students - Duplicated emails can affect students' access to the Arbor Student Portal and password resets.

Duplicate email addresses may also disrupt 3rd party integrations. Review all duplicates in the table below.

Fixing the duplicates

To start fixing duplicates, go to School > Data > Data Quality Dashboard > Suspected Duplicates > Emails.

This page lists email addresses that are present on more than one profile and will cause login issues for staff, parents or guardians. We recommend resolving the ones with a tick in the Staff column first.

You'll see a tick in each column only if the people affected are:

• Staff with a current or future Business Role - resolve these to prevent staff login issues
• Guardians who are linked to at least one student with a current or future enrolment - resolve these to prevent issues when guardians try to log into the Parent Portal or Parent App
• Students with a current or future enrolment - resolve these to prevent issues when students try to log into Student Portal

There'll be crossed out in the columns where users have left the school, so wouldn't try to log in - it isn't urgent to resolve these.

You can order the table by clicking any of the column headers. For example, clicking the Will cause staff login issues? column allows you to bring results for staff with likely login issues to the top.

Click an email address to see what profiles the email address has been added to on a slide-over, and you can see what type of user each profile is (student, staff or guardian).

For example, for the top row in the screenshot above, this can cause login issues for the staff member and the guardian, but not the student, even though the email address is present on all three account types. This is because the system will attempt to log in the student first, but this will stop the staff member or guardians from being able to log into their staff or guardian accounts.

If you have multiple students or guardians with the same name, you're able to tell them apart because:

• Students will have their current registration form next to their name. Any students without this are not currently enrolled in your school.
• Guardians will show which students they are linked to, helping you to differentiate them based on their children. 

If you're sure the student or guardian profiles are actually the same person, we recommend resolving the duplicate profiles. For how to do this, see our articles for staff, guardians and students.

You can change or delete the email address from a profile right from this page. On the slide over:

• Click the profile you want to amend

• Change the email address and click Save Changes to amend the email address

  Or

• Click Delete to delete the email address
• Confirm the deletion on the pop-up

You'll then be taken back to the slide over, where you can make any additional changes if needed, or close it if you've made all the changes you need to. This only deletes the email address from the profile, not the whole profile.

If you've made a mistake, you'll need to go to the user's profile directly using the search, then use the +Add button in the Contact Details section to re-add the email address.

What to do after fixing the duplicate

As the email address for one user will have been changed or deleted, it's a good idea to make sure they can still log in. If you've edited an email address, let the user know the new email address they should try logging in with.

When you've deleted a user's email address:

• If the person had another email address logged on their profile, this will become the default email address and the email they will need to log in with.
• If the user didn't have another email address, their username will default to the non-email username. We'd recommend adding a new email address for them to make sure they can log in across all platforms.

Top Tip: Can't find them in the search box? Use the Global search! Here you can see all current and past users with this name!

Can we resolve duplicate emails in bulk?

It is not possible to resolve the issues in bulk from this page.

However, some pages allow you to delete email addresses in bulk, such as if you do not use the Student Portal, and don't want to store email addresses for students. In this case, you can go to Students > All Students > Bulk Update > Student Contact Details.

Select the Email cells you wish to empty (this is like selecting cells in Excel), and hit Delete on your keyboard or use the Bulk action to Bulk Fill and click Submit without entering any data in the New Value field.