About OHS Contacts
The OHS Contacts System is a tool used by central offices to identify individuals in departments across campus with whom they wish to be able to communicate or to authorize to perform some action on the department's behalf. The central office, referred to as the sponsoring department, will establish a contact type in the OHS Contacts System and then ask each department to identify a person for that department's contact. Authorized updaters in each department will use the OHS Contacts system to assign someone as the department's contact. Then, the sponsoring department can communicate with this representative group of individuals, or the sponsoring department can build an information system which allows contacts to perform a certain administrative function on the department's behalf.
Official Roles
Contact types that authorize individuals to perform mission-critical actions on
behalf of a department are referred to as official roles. Because
of the potential authority that may be granted to individuals assigned, updaters should
be aware of the privileges that are granted to anyone in an official role
when assigning contacts. Contact types that are official roles will have the
icon in the
Official column.
Informational Contacts
All contact types that do not fall under the category of official roles are known as informational contacts. Typically, these contact types are used by the sponsoring department to generate an e-mail list made up of current contacts across the campus or to have a person in each department that the central office can contact when topical issues arise.
Primary versus Backup Contacts
For each contact type, whether the type is an official role or an informational
contact, there is one person assigned as the primary contact, and
zero or more people who may be assigned as backup contact(s). The
distinction between primary and backup depends on the usage of this information by
each sponsoring department. Individuals who are the primary contacts for a contact
type will have the 
icon in
the Primary column.
Mandatory Contact Types
Sponsoring departments can decide whether contact types should be
mandatory. This means that departments should initially assign
primary contacts for mandatory contact types as soon as possible. Once a primary
contact has been assigned, that contact can only be removed by being replaced
with another contact. The primary contact cannot be removed without a replacement
ID (position ID or UT EID) being provided. Mandatory contact types are identified
by the 
icon in the
Mandatory column.