Studentnet® Cloudburst

01 August 2015

Studentnet recognises that provisioning and maintenance of accounts and groups is a heavy consumer of staff time (and hence cost) for school ICT departments. Cloudwork's new account/groups provisioning features lead to a direct bottom line benefit for your school. By automating these processes, school management can be re-assured that critical identity credentials are being maintained in comprehensive and accurate manner. Finally Cloudwork's dashboard provides a central point for logging and reporting, permitting convenient forensic audit capabilities.

All of this means lower costs, greater certainty, and comfort, knowing that your school's identity management compliance and governance obligations are being fully met.

Welcome to the provisioning edition of Cloudburst! We'd like to bring you up to date on some of our recent advances, including:
  • Google Classroom: What's on your wish-list for integrating Google's Classroom?
  • Automatic AD Provisioning: Automated provisioning and maintenance of accounts in AD from your SMS is now live!
  • Canvas: Our account & course provisioning code has been cut and tested... now we're looking for a beta-test school – any volunteers?
  • New Services on our developer program: SEQTA & Elcom – Welcome to two new services being established on our developer program.

Google Classroom Integration: Account & Class Provisioning

Google's Classroom facility needs no introduction from us, we know how popular this free facility is amongst the Google Apps school community.

However, the bad news is that this great facility still requires the teacher to create classes and populate those classes with the students attending that class. Even worse, it is the teacher's responsibility to maintain the class list over the course of the year.

The good news is that Cloudwork's existing Google Groups maintenance feature is being extended to automatically create the classes and populate the class lists on the basis of the information already maintained within Cloudwork. Even better, the Classroom integration feature will be built at no cost to existing Cloudwork Connect users. It will be added as a new feature to the existing Cloudwork Connect product, available for all schools to use.

As part of that development effort we'd like to identify early adopter schools to contribute their ideas on new ideas for the Classroom integration feature and possibly also to act as beta testers.

Automatic AD Provisioning

The much-anticipated automated AD provisioning feature is now live. Studentnet is glad to announce that the first school implementations have now commenced.

The Cloudwork Dashboard has been upgraded to provide summary logging and reporting of AD provisioning activity. Initial information will include:start time, number of new accounts, number of modified accounts, end time, and process duration.

Future releases will incorporate detailed logging and real-time activity charting.

Canvas Integration: Account & Course provisioning

Studentnet is proud to announce that we have joined the Canvas Developer Partner program, ensuring that we have access to Canvas developer documentation, APIs and test environment. Studentnet registered on that program to improve our automated integration capabilities for Canvas within Cloudwork's identity management system. Initially we will now be capable of automated provisioning of accounts and Canvas courses.

Our coding effort for our first version is now nearing completion with internal testing commencing. We'd like to invite existing Canvas school users to join us in beta testing our new capabilities.

Come and join us on this exciting journey with Canvas!

Welcome to SEQTA and Elcom!

In 2014 Studentnet formalised our existing developer sandbox facility by introducing our Cloudwork Developer program. This program provides developers with their own test identity-provider environment within which they can fully test their product. Not only does this program ensure that products are fully compliant with identity management standards and protocols but it also provides an opportunity to simplify configuration set-ups and implementations.

We'd like to welcome SEQTA and Elcom as our newest partners on the Cloudwork Developer Partner program!

Leading a Digital School Conference – come and say "Hello"

Studentnet will be exhibiting at the Leading a Digital School conference in Melbourne, August 20-22 – come and visit us at our booth. Even if you can't make the conference, we're always interested in your feedback and good ideas on improving identity management at your school. Let us know what you need – feel free to give us a call to catch up!

Best Regards
The Studentnet Team

STUDENTNET®     ABN 90 001 966 892
Suite 1, 89 Jones St, Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia
Email: info@studentnet.net     Site: studentnet.net
Tel +61 2 9281 1626         NOC +61 2 9281 3905

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