Challenge

Operating in Hartford, Wisconsin, the School District of Hartford provides public education to all elementary students in the city. The School District of Hartford runs three schools, educating over 1,700 students.

The district’s 200 staff members rely on Microsoft Office applications to complete their everyday work tasks. When the School District of Hartford chose to upgrade to the latest version, Microsoft Office 365, the IT team identified an opportunity to integrate the Office platform with other internal systems and directories.

“A new feature of Office 365 is the inclusion of web applications in subscription packages, in addition to traditionally desktop-only programs,” explained Ryan Radschlag, Network Manager at the School District of Hartford. “This enables staff to log in to previously internal-only systems at home or on-the-go. To ensure the Office 365 browser-based services were as secure as desktop applications, we wanted to strengthen our identity management processes – without massively increasing the administrative burden for our team of two.”

Solution

A long-term user of NetIQ Access Manager, the School District of Hartford chose to deploy Identity Manager to complement its existing solution. Capable of supporting a wide range of applications and services, Identity Manager was a natural choice for the organization.

Using the Identity Manager Office 365 Driver, the IT team integrated its local data repository, NetIQ eDirectory, with the Office 365 Active Directory service to synchronize user accounts across both systems.

“Deployment was quick and easy. The Identity Manager Office 365 Driver is a great addon solution and exactly what we needed,” Radschlag said. “We were able to synchronize existing accounts very easily, using data from eDirectory to automatically provision staff with a unique account and password.”

“We wanted user identities to remain transparent across the organization,” Radschlag continued. “Now that all Office 365 applications and internal systems run through Identity Manager, we can offer users a single point of access and a seamless user experience.”

Identity Manager provisions and synchronizes user accounts across systems automatically, requiring little or no manual input. “Not only does having a single set of credentials across all applications make life simpler for staff, it has also significantly reduced administrative workload – a great advantage for our small IT team,” Radschlag said.

Results

With the Identity Manager solution in place, the School District of Hartford gained greater control over access to web-based Office 365 applications.

“Having a single, centralized point of management is fantastic as we can now monitor access to all systems much more efficiently,” Radschlag said. “The Identity Manager solution’s compatibility and flexibility with other products gives it a real edge over competing offerings.”

Identity Manager easily integrates with both eDirectory and Office 365 and ensures flexible, identity-based user access management across the district’s IT environment. In addition, automated user synchronization freed up a significant amount of time and resources for the IT team, boosting productivity.

Building on this success, the School District of Hartford plans to integrate its student information system with Identity Manager. This will transform lifecycle management of student user accounts, enabling automated provisioning and deprovisioning of accounts as children enter and leave the district’s system.

“We are very happy with the Identity Manager solution and hope to expand its scope within our organization in the coming years,” Radschlag concluded.