Automating Schools' User Management Makes Dollars and Sense

For schools, budgets are always tight. Add to that strict regulations and reduced financial support from local and county government, and they are under enormous pressure to operate efficiently.

One solution many districts are using to reduce budgets and streamline efficiencies is automating user accounts of students and staff. Countless schools throughout the U.S. are using simple solutions to manage the thousands of user accounts they create at the beginning of each session and host throughout a term.

Hutto School District in Texas implemented a user management resource administrator (UMRA) system to automatically manage user accounts including password re-sets, saving the district an average of three hours for each help desk request generated by a user.

North Hunterdon-Voorhees School District in New Jersey uses a similar UMRA to automate the process of provisioning and de-provisioning student user accounts so that its internal IT department no longer spends countless hours performing password re-sets and managing the deluge of daily helpdesk tickets related to account access issues.

And Murray Independent School District in Kentucky uses an UMRA to maximize efficiency while receiving less funding, said Rusty Back, the school’s CIO.

“Before we used the user management resource administrator, I manually managed the creation and deletion of user accounts,” Back said. “These tasks took up most of my time, and the demands placed on IT continued to increase. We needed processes that would allow me to perform other, more important IT duties.”

User management systems allow IT staffs the power to push password reset abilities and account modifications to the staff via a web portal. The web portal lets faculty and staff reset student passwords without having to wait for an IT staff member to fulfill the request. And because passwords can be reset by the faculty and staff, there is little to no down time for students.

Educators seeking alternatives to hiring additional staff to manage user accounts can find automated solution like UMRA to create, change and delete user accounts for both students and staff, replacing manual execution of account creation.

Travis Brown, Network Administrator for Hutto ISD said, "The user management resource administrator software saved our district considerable man hours and resources by automatically managing our user accounts in Active Directory. We began saving time and money immediately."

The systems automatically synchronize data between the student information system, the campus and Active Directory, eliminating the need for manual redundancies or needless hours spent managing user accounts by members of the helpdesk staff.

The software manages bulk user creation, modifications and deletions for the district. What was once a manual process can now be automated and run daily within a school environment. Data is pulled from the cloud and synced with the school’s Active Directory at each project run, ensuring user accounts are up to date and that Active Directory is clean, organized and has a consistent folder structure.

“The software saves us from having to do manual scripting and spending resources on tasks that can be automated,” said Brown. “Our team can now focus on high-impact projects that benefit the entire Hutto district.”

At Pinellas County School District, in Pinellas County, Florida, the district has 138 schools ranging from pre-K to 12th grade, as well as an adult school for community and work force education. With 103,000 students, 8,500 teachers and more than 200,000 parents, the IT staff spent an inordinate amount of time correcting account problems and the help desk received a large volume of calls about password issues.

One of the biggest problems for the district was addressing the needs of its teachers, who often had problems when they were off for summer break and either forgot their password or were locked out because of password expiration over this time period.

The school implemented an UMRA solution to automatically populate the parent portal, student information system and any other systems as required, eliminating a tedious and potentially error-prone manual process.

“Parents are very connected these days, so they need to have access to the parent portal to get an answer on any questions that they have,” said John Just, assistant superintendent at Pinellas County School District.

Within the first year of roll out, Pinellas enrolled more than 200,000 parents in both UMRA and a separate self service reset password manager (SSRPM) concurrently. SSRPM is a self-service application that allows end users to reset their Active Directory passwords. The number of password-related calls to the helpdesk has been reduced significantly, said Just.

As another school year opens, IT leaders within school settings have at least one option for cutting costs and trimming the number of man hours spent handling redundant tasks. Perhaps, doing so allows for much needed time and resources to be sent in more important places, like the classroom.

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