[sims] SIMS sync to AD

[fiza]

I was searching for tools to sync SIMS to AD to enable creation of groups mainly. This is for further integration into GAFE. I know of Salamandersoft but its quite expensive. Searching on Edugeek I found ANB Software Homepage who make Activman. Has anyone ever used this software? It is much cheaper than anything I have seen so far. Which does make me wonder if its any good.

[vikpaw]

Never heard of it. It looks cheap - worryingly cheap If you've got a flat network it looks like it should do what you want. I wouldn't fancy the internet option.

 

Capita were selling their Active Directory Provisioning tool as a standalone product, but it's not as flexible as SalamanderSoft.

 

If you haven't spoken to Salamander directly, i would, we can't rate them highly enough, and you get a lot of flexibility and additional stuff for your money that all comes under the umbrella of the AD product for creating groups. We actually use ours to populate another database which runs our ID card system.

They can also do stuff with setting up users from scratch as well as grouping them, setting up home folders and linking to exchange, setting up mailing lists based on the groups . . . etc.

 

We have also used tools from ManageEngine for working with AD, these might be pricy, depends on the features you want, but allow a lot of features as well. We've been considering an add-on which gives you an app you can use to change password, unlock account and other stuff, for our parental accounts which will be rolled out soon.

[fiza]

@vikpaw - I think we are just going to run reports on class lists from SIMS and then manipulate these to import directly into Google to create the groups. Its a manual process but it does what we want.

[vikpaw]

Fair enough, it should be possible to automate it, if you can schedule your exports via CommandReporter. Not sure how GAFE does it's import though, you should be able to script any manipulation of the output CSV / Excel doc.

 

Edit: for that sole task, it might be worth trying the ANB thingy at the lowest number of student level just to compare. - Maybe you can get a trial.

[jmak]

Thread necromancy:

 

Does anyone use ANB Activman for provisioning AD from SIMS? I know it can be done in Powershell, but not with my level of ability. For the price of this product, it's not worth messing about trying to learn something new. There's a free trial available, but everyone in our SIMS already has an AD presence, so I couldn't prove much....

[matt40k]

SalamanderSoft isn't cheap, but it's cheaper then doing it manually and it isn't the sort of thing you should cut corners on especially as its a critical thing for GDPR \ Data protection \ data security. Just my thought.

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

Capita produces a product called SIMS ID that will do it too.