A case study: implementing novell identity management at Drew University

• Authors: E. Axel Larsson
• Venue: Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User services
• Year: 2005

Starting in 2003, Drew University began a process to replace its manual account management procedures with an automated provisioning system based upon Novell technologies. Over the past two years, the scope of this project has expanded beyond managing network accounts, to include providing identity and data integration services for a wide variety of third-party and home-grown applications encompassing everything form our campus ID card system to an admitted students' portal.This paper will present a case-study in Drew's implementation of Novell identity management solutions for meta-directories, provisioning, and single-sign-on. Attendees will see realistic examples of the integration challenges we faced and how we solved them.Among the challenges faced in the implementation of this solution was integration with Drew's twenty year old legacy administrative system. This paper will show how we have been able to overcome the technical and non-technical challenges associated with legacy system integration. This paper will also show how we were able to replace the numerous ad-hoc connections that had been made between this system and other applications over its lifespan with a single bridge to the identity management system, thereby reducing costs, allowing us to support more applications, and increasing the longevity and usefulness of the legacy administrative system as well as the information contained within it.Many institutions are currently facing the challenges associated with implementing identity management solutions. Technical managers who are interested in seeing how this technology can be applied to build a powerful infrastructure for supporting a wide variety of applications should read this paper.