Active Directory accounts for students

[disk]

Not sure if this is the best forum for this question, but here it goes.

 

We currently have all staff and faculty in Active Directory. Our students have accounts within OpenLDAP. Over the past 10 years or so, whenever I would attend any education-centric IT conference, when the subject was inevitably brought up, it seemed we were always the only institution whose students were not also in Active Directory.

 

There are many use cases that have come up over the years where having them in Active Directory was the only way or easier way to accomplish something. We are finally at the point where myself and a coworker have been asked to write up a business case for migrating students to Active Directory.

 

I just wanted to post this here in case any one had any advice/input on this subject.

[Blue_Cookeh]

I don't see why you wouldn't to be honest. It gives you an easy way to provide user-based reporting on Web filtering, share permissions, allows easy integration into Office365/Google Suite and other applications. It's a no-brainer really.

[disk]

I don't see why you wouldn't to be honest. It gives you an easy way to provide user-based reporting on Web filtering, share permissions, allows easy integration into Office365/Google Suite and other applications. It's a no-brainer really.

 

I always saw it that way but every time the subject was brought up, it tended to receive a lot of pushback. There was a split many years ago and some departments within IT embraced OpenLDAP and others AD.

[Norphy]

Can we get a bit more context? Is this a school or university? Are you running OpenLDAP on Linux or something else? What else besides authentication are you using it for, does it tie into other systems?

 

On the face of it, having one authentication system serving all of your users makes sense but you need to consider the work that you need to do to unpick it all.