CIO Wireless Summit

1
Identity Management
Choosing and Using Suns Identity Management Suite
March 13th, 2007
Kim Tracy Executive Director University
Computing Services Northeastern Illinois
University 1 773-442-4374 K-tracy_at_neiu.edu
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Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU)

• Public university on northwest side of Chicago
• 12,000 students, 2,200 faculty staff
• Commuter campus (no housing)
• Large number of transfers

3
Starting NEIU Environment

• In process of implementing full SGHE Banner suite
  (including Luminis portal)
• Independent accounts on systems
• Exchange for faculty/staff
• SunOne e-mail for students
• Novell file shares
• Blackboard
• Luminis portal
• Other LDAP-controlled resources
• Used homegrown tools to sync and populate
  accounts from existing SIS (Jenzabar/CARS)
• Had sync-ed account names for LDAP/Novell/AD

4
Our Scope and Problems to Address

• Account and password integration across all
  resources
• Web-based Single Sign On via Luminis to
  Blackboard e-mail systems
• Feed from existing SIS to IdM to create roles,
  account and e-mail addresses
• Something that would evolve to integrate with
  Banner as we deploy it
• Initial phase in about 2 months from project
  start
• To synchronize and provision accounts and
  passwords on all major resources
• Needed to coincide with Luminis portal deployment
• SSO between Luminis, Blackboard, and e-mail
• Later phases to handle deprovisioning, other
  resources

5
The Decision Process

• Used an RFP process to get bids from major IdM
  vendors
• Only gave vendors a couple of weeks to respond
• Required an integrated response (implementation,
  HW, SW)
• Required coordination between vendors
  implementors
• Key factors
• Ability to implement in short timeframe
• Software capability
• Consistency with planned architecture
• Narrowed to two vendors
• Got more detailed proposals
• Choose a Sun/Simplesoft proposal that best
  addressed our RFP requirements and factors

6
Solution Implementation

• Got an integrated response from Simplesoft/Sun
  that included
• 5 Sun Servers
• The Sun Identity Management Suite
• Simplesoft implementation services
• Most functionality was out of the box
• User interface for account initialization and
  password reset was tuned to our requirements
• Used LDAP for Blackboard Luminis to simplify
  process
• Used SSO in Luminis instead of Sun Access Manager
• Integrations for Blackboard and Luminis written
  to their respective specifications
• Built a back-feed to populate SIS with e-mail and
  account IDs created by IdM

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Summary Status

• Phase 1 pretty much on time
• Was difficult and took a lot of coordination
• Still working on
• SSO w/Blackboard
• Fully automating provisioning of accounts to
  Luminis Blackboard
• We have cleaned up many long standing account
  management issues by taking our lumps now
• Users had to reset passwords to adhere to strong
  password policy
• Now, users have access to all their resources
  with one account initialization
• Now have a platform on which to
• build further role-based services to support
  alumni, retirees, prospective students, etc.
• Integrate SSO with most major systems

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Questions?