[sims] SIMS + Active Directory

[Tefters]

Afternoon all,

 

Want to throw a question out to the masses here about what people do for their AD logon creation process within their school. Interested in secondary and above.

 

Having implemented systems such as Moodle, Access-IT, Equitrac, Show My Homework and a ton of others i'm now really annoyed with the way the so called "LDAP Synchronization" is handled.

 

Technically they are not synchronizing they just using LDAP authentication and then marrying up Firstname/Surname with accounts in their own systems, as such you then either create users manually in these systems or have to have a SIMS synchronization setup.

 

Now i'm more than happy to have these synchronize with SIMS and then use LDAP authentication accept for the fact that SIMS and Active Directory do not natively have a synchronize method and I usually just do SIMS export before the start of a new year and then CSV import to create the users with the username convention, exchange attributes etc... that I want.

This process works great until admission staff and other admin people realise that students names are wrong, spelt wrong, have random characters in (usually hyphen), surname/forename the wrong way round and change them. Same goes for mid year name changes, mid year admissions etc...

 

Now you would think "well whats the issue here?", the admin people email IT support and let them know so they can make the necessary change... NOPE. As a result Jonny now cant logon to the library system because his AD details do not match that of the details in the library system sync'd from SIMS.

 

I'm looking at SalamanderSoft's Active Directory tool at the moment and just wanted to see what others out there are doing in these scenario's as I'm getting tired of constant mistakes/changes in SIMS being made and we're not advised therefore impacting authentication on other systems.

 

Thanks in advanced.

 

Andy

[vikpaw]

Salamander Tool would be a good way to go.

Our MIS is the source of data elsewhere. Luckily, for students this is just a code, which can't change. The SIMS Admission number in fact. This is then their barcode for library, login to PC, on their ID badge, etc.

 

Third party systems are more likely to link to AD than to SIMS, so it makes sense to have some sort of automation from the MIS into AD.

 

If you have SLG - this has to be done through the ADP (Active Directory Provisioning) service, which is available standalone, but Salamander is far more bespoke, including make user folders for you, permissioning, and a heap of other things. They'll even link to Moodle for you.

[Tefters]

Cheers Vik, pretty much what I thought.

 

I'd love to change the logon scheme but thats just not feasibly possible in the environment i'm in due to the ammount of students currently in play.

 

Salamander is looking promising to keep the information in sync so will be looking at a demo Tuesday.

 

Andy

[vikpaw]

I insisted on doing it here, after a year of Y10JonesBGradYr1112-0002 type usernames, and having to change them every year, along with folders and other links.

Edit: they took to it easily, because it was always changed anyway, plus it was stuck in their homework planners as a label, on their library card, on the ID badge. You just need to make it easy for the staff to access and re-inform them when they forget.

Edited March 15, 2015 by vikpaw