Education and Free Email Services

One of the recent trends in the Education market over the last couple of years are the free email offerings from Google and Microsoft. While Gmail and MSlive@edu offer a number of tangible benefits to schools and universities, including a permanent account for alumni, creating and managing the accounts can be a challenge. Adding to this issue, password from Active Directory are no longer automatically synchronized and, especially if you were using Exchange, an additional burden can be placed on the helpdesk to reset email passwords.

Tools4ever offers solutions to both of these common issues when moving to Gmail or MS Live. Our User Management Resource Administrator can take a feed from your Student Information System and use data from there to automatically create user accounts in the hosted email solution. Further, when students graduate, their AD accounts can programmatically be moved to an Alumni OU and the appropriate indication made in either Gmail or MS Live.

Our PSM (Password Synch Manager) and SSRPM (Self Service Reset Password Manager) also have links in both of these email applications. IF a user forgets a password in AD or the email solution they can visit a web page, answer a series of challenge questions, and reset both passwords simultaneously. Although not as common for students, faculty and staff typically will have expiration dates on passwords and will need to reset them on a regular basis. PSM allows the capturing of this new AD password and can send it off to the email application to insure the passwords remain in synch.
To learn how Tools4ever can help prevent your free mail system from costing a fortune in maintenance and help desk time, please visit our website: Tools4ever, Inc.