There is a lot of functionality which makes up an IAM solution but course folder management is functionality which continues to astonish system admins. When obtaining an identity management product, one would not expect the ability to manage the full lifecycle of student course folders, but this is a feature which has proven to be extremely beneficial.
Interestingly enough, requests for this type of functionality have become common, as more and more schools have begun looking for additional functionality from their automated account management solution.
Here is how this beneficial functionality works:
Using the automation module of automated account management solution, a routine is configured to query the organizations student informational system, in this case for example, PowerSchool. The query retrieves a list of courses, teachers, and students enrolled within each course and also collects a list of existing course folders located across multiple file servers to be used for the synchronization.
Once all the data has been collected, the routine confirms each course has an associated folder, if not one is immediately created. Next the routine confirms each teacher has full control of the folder associated with the courses they are teaching. Finally, upon enrolling in a course, the student receives a folder within the course folder, therefore any document placed within their folder can easily be access by the teacher.
In the case a student drops a course, permission to their course directly is immediately removed. In the case they were to re-enroll in the course, all permission would be reinstated. When the semester has completed, all student permission to the course folders are removed, only allowing the teacher to have access to further review any documents. The entire folder structure for the course is then removed after a predefined time period, in this particular case for example it was set to 30 days.
This course folder management functionally has been stated to be an extreme time saver for the system administrator. It allows the administrator to not have to manually create and manage a large scale of course folders per semester and gain back a huge block of time which was once spent on this task.
For additional information pertaining to User Management Resource Administrator (UMRA), please go to Tools4ever.com