Summer Fun - From Helping the Helpdesk

I came across a blog posting from a few years back at the Helping the Helpdesk blog and I thought it was worth reposting. Little has changed and we are still inundated with calls from school districts struggling to find a way to manage users accounts before the start of the new year. The approach described below follows Tools4ever's method for synchronizing student information systems such as PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, and Aeries with your Active Directory and other resources like Google Apps, Live@edu, Destiny and so on.  I hope you find the post helpful!

Summer Fun

The summer time means vacations, no school, hitting the beach, and all kinds of great fun. Unless of course, you are a system administrator for a school district. The summer then means you are squeezing in every major project that you can before school starts up again in August or September, depending on the region in which you reside. As such, the last thing you have time for is dealing with student active directory accounts.

Yet, you will have an influx of new students. And depending on your organizational unit structure, you may need to roll over these accounts into new OU’s based on graduation year or grade level. Maybe these grad year or grade level OU’s are within a higher level OU for each school in the district. Perhaps each grad year or grade level has a specific share somewhere, on which the user’s home directories must reside. These home directories need to move with the student throughout his or her career in the district.Then, of course, there are group memberships, which most likely created within the same design as the OU structure.

Manually provisioning all of this can take weeks. Scripting these tasks in visual basic is slow and tedious as well. With User Management Resource Administrator’s Automation module, you can streamline these tasks, and have them occur on a scheduled basis. Here is a high level overview of such a process:

• UMRA queries the SIS system, or csv export of student information
• This data is compared to AD
• New accounts are created based upon existence in the SIS system and not AD
• Updates to accounts occur based upon existence of the user in the SIS and AD
• Account disables are based upon either an inactive flag in the SIS, or the lack of the account existing in the SIS when it exists in AD

Processes for group and home directory provisioning can be based up a graduation year or grade level, even if this information is not necessarily provided (to be detailed in a coming post). Automation can be scheduled nightly, or more or less frequently as needed. All actions against AD accounts and their resources are logged for auditing and troubleshooting purposes. It can even generate email alerts for you.

You are now free to (not) enjoy your summer break doing other tasks.

You’re welcome. ;)

For more information, please visit Tools4ever

Benefits of IDM in Higher Ed - Harrison College Case Study

Often, when we begin working on identity management projects with an educational institution, we really are starting from scratch. The organization typically has been relying on a series of manual processes, scripts, and utilities which can be quite limiting in today's modern environment.  Below is a summary and actual case study that was written by Harrison College in Indianapolis, IN detailing why they had to move forward with IDM and their results working with Tools4ever.

Problem
With over 6,000 students using one student Active Directory account, there was a huge opportunity to streamline the management of individual accounts as well as deploying a self service password reset solution. Harrison only had a single generic student Active Directory account used by all students. Each student was provided a thumb drive and would log into accounts using the same credentials and would have to save work on their local drive. Additionally, each student was responsible for creating their own email accounts.

Solution
Automated solution for managing student user accounts and self-service password reset.

Connectors
Google Apps
CampusVue

Results
Increased efficiency in managing user accounts and self service password reset management.

 
Considerations

Before Harrison could implement an identity and access management solution they had to ensure the solution they chose met the following requirements:

Was cost effective;
Experience with Google Apps API and provisioning accounts;
Self-service tools that can run 24/7;
Could integrate easily with CampusVue.

Being able to integrate fully with Google Apps was critical because the project to bring on an identity management solution also coincided with a project to have each student have a Google account. This would give them access to an email and Google Apps account. Managing the users’ lifecycle for this endeavor called for a robust user management tool.

Solutions

With over 6,000 students and 900 staff, Harrison College looked to Tools4ever for a solution to help them with their identity and access management challenge. Tools4ever’s User Management Resource Administrator (UMRA) proved to be the best option in managing the users’ lifecycle and provisioning into the applications and systems the students needed. Additionally, there was a need for Harrison to implement a self-service password reset tool that could also work seamlessly with user accounts.

Jason Stele, Assistant Director of Information Services, described their need as, “We could have never brought on student email or student Active Directory accounts without Tools4ever. They helped enable us to effectively manage large numbers of individual user accounts with minimal staff resources by leveraging UMRA.” 

Around the clock support

Because Harrison College is spread out among 13 campuses and offers an online program they serve students from any given time between 7:00 AM and 10:00 PM. But since most support staff members only work until 5:00 PM it was important that they implement a solution with around the clock support. By also implementing Tools4ever’s Self Service Password Reset Management (SSRPM) solution Harrison College has placed the ownership of password resets into the hands of the student. This has not only allowed password resets to happen after hours, but has also greatly reduced calls coming in during standard work hours.

Improved Efficiency

According to Stele, one of the greatest advantages of deploying UMRA has been a significant resource reduction in managing the users’ accounts. Together, UMRA and SSRPM have enabled Harrison College to utilize connectivity with Google Apps as well as CampusVue to roll out efficient tools to the student population. UMRA has also laid the groundwork for the implementation of additional technologies that will allow both the staff and students to have fast and secure access to the tools and systems they need.

For more information on tools4ever, please visit our site.

Challenge of cloud based email - Google Apps - Live@edu/Office 365

I have written previously about the proliferation of cloud based email solutions such as Google Apps and Microsoft's Live@edu, but the continuous growth in the public and private sectors warrants discussion of some of the challenges with these new systems.  As I mentioned before, there are tremendous benefits to these systems, especially for school districts and universities, but they do create a new level of provisioning and password management to an organization's current identity management process.

These systems are not natively integrated to an organization's directory service (Active Directory, eDirectory, Open Directory) which means an additional process to the onboarding and deprovisioning policies.  Additionally, because passwords are not synchronized with Active Directory, an even greater burden is placed on IT and the help desk for password resets for these accounts. Furthermore, anyone currently using either of the mentioned hosted email solutions will know that the native management tools such as Google Sync or Windows Live Admin Center are not staying current with the fast changing feature set.  For example, managing dynamic distribution groups is not easily done and this is a huge disservice to Live@edu users.  In Google Apps, users are now taking advantage of the new container structure but finding managing these OUs and groups with Google Sync to be an incredibly frustrating experience.

Fortunately, these organizations can partner with a company like Tools4ever who has the experience to solve these challenges and to help strengthen the business case for implementing new cloud based email systems.  Tools4ever's User Management Resource Administrator (UMRA) can provide an all encompassing provisioning process that can automatically pull data from a student information system and create an Active Directory account and an account in Live@edu or Google Apps.  As the student progresses and moves from different classes and grades throughout the district, UMRA will automatically keep their account up to date.  UMRA can also automatically manage class email lists using data in the SIS and provide self service management options to end users, such as teachers, to easily add and remove users from email groups.

Tools4ever can also provide password management options that can link between your email and directory service.  Their Password Synchronization Manager will keep passwords synchronized between each account and the Self Service Reset Password Management software will provide an end user system for resets using a challenge and response mechanism. 

For more information on how Tools4ever can help keep your cloud email implementation from costing a fortune, visit our website.