I have recently started seeing tens of e-mails each day come through to re-certify users who are expiring soon.
Up until now I have been just doing them one by one manually, however I have noticed that I can go to the admin tool, select everybody, go to certify and use the options to “Only renew certificates that will expire before” then pick a date, say 6 months or a year from now and go.
My question is, is there anything wrong with me doing it this way? Any suggestions or things I should look out for will be appreciated.
I would print out the view you’re looking to recert (60 days, 90 days …) and check the DD to make sure they have a valid account. Then, sure, that’s the easiest way to recert and not have to deal with expired certs.
Remember that the point of expiring/recertifying is to catch inactive accounts.
If you do it the way you suggest, you are not making sure each of those accounts is still in use. (Receiving the request from the user is a definite indicator that the account is in use.)
If you have other checks and balances, recognizing inactive accounts might not be a concern.
Also, all of the users updated in a batch will have the same expiration date the next time around. You might want to do smaller batches and change the expiration date for each so that not all of your users are coming due at the same time.