Certificate - CSR Organization Unit Changes

Our certificate authority, QuoVadis, will start to restrict what can and cannot be entered in the 'OU' field (Organization Unit) for certificate requests. The 'OU' field, if required, is designed for divisions and departments within the organisation it is not mandatory and can be left blank.

We have a number of certificates historically issued where the Organization Unit field has random entries such as copying the Organisation name, random numbers, addresses and domain names listed in them. These type of entries will no longer be accepted and if entered into the request will cause delays in issuing the certificate as the request will be returned, the CSR (Certificate Signing Request) will need to be recreated and the certificate requested again.

The 'OU' field is designed for departments within the organisation such as IT, HR, Finance if it is not required we would  recommend the field is left blank as it is not a mandatory field. There may be exceptions where we can add an OU entry to the allowed list if required with good reasoning, but hopefully we have captured them all already from the history.

We believe this will not affect the majority of our users but wanted to give warning of this change if you do have a certificate request returned for this reason.

If you have any questions please email us at certificates@jisc.ac.uk.