As summer is upon us, not everyone in your school district is looking forward to a relaxing few months. System Admins often need to prepare for the new school year by making all the appropriate changes to their network. Hundreds of students need to be added and have accounts created for them, another couple of hundred move up to a different grade level, and still another couple of hundred graduate.
Often these tasks are left up to a admin who needs to manually make all of these changes! This is extremely time consuming and often leaves the district scrambling to have everything in order before school starts. Even when classes begin students, teachers, and staff often do not have the correct access or need changes made to their accounts.
Case in point is Waller Independent School District. Each year hundreds of students begin school at one of Waller ISD’s eight locations, and need to be added to the school’s network, as well as have the appropriate accounts created for them. Additionally, several hundred other students move onto different grade levels, leave the district, or change campuses. This is also the case for employees working in the district. Each time an employee begins working at the district, leaves or moves to a different campus, any account management tasks had to be completed manually. “All of this required a full-time employee on staff just to handle all student and employee account management tasks. It is an extremely time-consuming and error-prone process. We don’t have the time or funding to keep up with that,” said Rosa Ojeda, the technology director at Waller ISD.
Pflguerville Independent School District also had a similar issue. The district had a full time staff member during the summer whose sole job was manually moving accounts, which of course took days or weeks, and often resulted in errors. These issues began effecting students and staff, when they were not able to login at the beginning of the semester as their accounts were not processed yet.
Both districts were able to automate their entire user account process, and eliminate manual tasks. This not only greatly improved the process of adding, changing, and disabling student accounts, it also allowed them to save a ton of resources and time.
An automated account management solution is setup to connect with both of the district’s student information systems. Anytime a change is made in the SIS it will automatically be reflected in all corresponding accounts and applications. This allows district staff to easily provision and de provision all student and employee accounts from one system, their SIS, to others such as, Google Apps, Exchange and Office 365 and have them automatically created each night. So, system admins can easily and correctly create accounts for students and employees, and get back a more relaxing summer.