Anoka-Hennepin School District

Identity Management Solution Keeps Parents in Large Minnesota School District Informed

The Anoka-Hennepin School District, the largest in Minnesota, focuses on educating its 41,000 students, one child at a time. The district strongly encourages parents to get actively involved in their children’s education, but a mixed software and hardware infrastructure made it difficult to offer parents access to relevant student and school program information. Anoka-Hennepin worked with Nazca Solutions, Inc., HP Consulting, and Microsoft Services to find a solution. A centralized, Web-based application, A-HConnect, was developed to put parents in touch with school and student information. It takes advantage of Microsoft® Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003 and the Active Directory® service to streamline information access for parents, students, and staff, while simplifying identity management and overall system administration for the district’s IT group.

Situation

Established in 1952, the Anoka-Hennepin School District is the largest public school district in the state of Minnesota. It encompasses schools in the 13 cities northwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul and serves a diverse population of pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade (PK through 12) students from rural to suburban to urban communities.

The Anoka-Hennepin School District is committed to delivering a high-quality educational experience that meets the individual learning needs of all its students. District administrators understand the role that technology plays in quality education as well as its importance in providing teachers with the tools to automate the flow of academic information such as grades, achievement tests, coursework and schedules, and attendance. In addition, the district embraces the interests of parents who want to help their children succeed academically. To support parent involvement Anoka-Hennepin strives to make student records and class information, as well as information about school programs, readily available.

Like many other large school districts, the IT infrastructure at Anoka-Hennepin is complex; it is populated by a diverse mix of disparate systems and applications, including both the Novell and the Windows® operating systems. Some of these systems were developed and managed in-house. Others are third-party solutions provided by organizations that supply such services for school districts throughout Minnesota.

At Anoka-Hennepin, like in so many other school districts, the evolution of various specialty systems (e.g., transportation, student information, library, cafeteria, etc.) has resulted in isolated silos of information, which complicates data access for teachers, students, and parents, and it makes systems management time consuming for IT administrators. For Anoka-Hennepin, this meant parents who were seeking information relied on materials sent home with students, or they had to call schools, complete information request forms, or travel to the schools for answers.

The fact that the different specialty systems required unique user names and passwords further complicated the flow and access of information. This added to support costs for system administrators, both in terms of initial setup and costs incurred whenever a user name or password was forgotten. Because many of the district’s existing systems required some degree of user authentication to access the different data directories, system managers had to create customized processes to transfer user information among systems.

In order to meet School Board goals to improve the lines of communication and provide a variety of services and information online, the school district’s Director of Technology and Information Services, Patrick Plant, challenged his team to find an effective way to deliver a portal that would centralize information access on the school district’s Web site. The ideal solution would take advantage of the district’s existing identity stores, eliminate isolated information isles, integrate authentication to information, and provide for single sign-on authorization to eliminate the need for multiple passwords.

Solution

The Anoka-Hennepin IT team began evaluating options to expand information access capabilities, while adhering to the strict budget constraints common to most school districts today. IT managers looked for a solution that could meet the district’s immediate needs within the current budget and that also would scale to meet future growth. Having expanded its Microsoft software environment over

The three companies—Nazca, HP, and Microsoft—provide a solid team that works well together and continues to help us meet our project objectives. Patrick Plant, Director of Technology and Information Services, Anoka-Hennepin School District

the last five years, standardizing on the Active Directory® service and largely using the Microsoft® .NET Framework, the district decided to focus on a solution based on the.NET Framework to take advantage of existing capabilities. The .NET Framework is an integral component of the Windows operating system and provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications

After evaluating different solutions and comparing costs and functionality, management developed a Parent/Teacher portal in conjunction with Nazca Solutions, Inc., a Microsoft Certified Partner. Plant explains, “Once again we turned to HP, our technology provider, to help us. We’ve counted on HP for ongoing support in building our IT infrastructure to integrate district functions for some time, so it was only natural for them to help us with this solution as well.” With HP consultants and Microsoft Services on the scene to help design the functional requirements of the solution and develop the integration strategy, an online, roles-based portal, A-HConnect, was launched to support the district’s students, staff, parents, and the public.

A-HConnect allows the district to capitalize on the functions of Active Directory, and it uses Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003 as the centralized service for storage, integration, and management of identity information. Active Directory provides user authorization with MIIS 2003 synchronizing identity information across the different systems. MIIS 2003 streamlines the provisioning and deprovisioning of parent and student data into Active Directory and automates the synchronization of user identity information with the other applications included in the portal. It also enables self-service and help-desk-initiated password management and reset from a Web browser.

“The Nazca solution was a good fit for Anoka-Hennepin because of its focus on public schools and other public entities,” explains Plant. “Nazca’s ability to quickly and easily integrate the solution with our existing systems allowed us to implement the solution in record time—at a fraction of the cost and time to deploy as compared to any other solutions we considered.”

Nazca built the solution using its patented, service-oriented-architecture (SOA) based data and services integration toolset, “The Spider,” which takes significant  advantage of the combined power of the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 and included two Windows Server 2003 domain controllers with Active Directory. Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0 running on HP ProLiant DL360 and DL380 servers provides the Web application infrastructure for the new system.

Involving the Community

After the project was approved in April, the team realized that if parents were to be given a chance to request accounts for the beginning of the new school year in September they would have to receive information before the summer vacation. With only a prototype in place, Georgia Kedrowski, Assistant Director of Technology and Information Services at Anoka-Hennepin, was charged with working with Nazca and asked the superintendent of schools to sign a letter to the parents informing them about A-H Connect and providing information to them about how to sign up for access. “For us to put that kind of information out there, with nothing yet in place, speaks to the great confidence we had in our business partners. The three companies—Nazca, HP, and Microsoft—provide a solid team that works well together and continues to help us meet our project objectives,” says Plant. By July, 18,000 parents had requested user accounts—clearly this was something they wanted.

Today, the new A-HConnect portal allows parents to locate the following types of information with ease. This might otherwise have required phone calls, paperwork, or a visit to school:

• Bus route information
• Lunch account balances and student PIN numbers
• Emergency contact information
• Students’ current schedules
• Gradebook and assignment information
• Link to the teachers’ e-mails from students’ schedules
• Attendance absence dates and codes
• Secondary grade history
• State and district standardized test results

Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 integrates identity information from sources throughout our different systems with minimum system interface. Patrick Plant, Director of Technology and Information Services, Anoka-Hennepin School District

Anoka Hennepin continues to increase the list of services it wants to provide online. In September 2005, the district began offering an option for elementary parents to request e-mail delivery of the spelling list each week. By the end of the year, it plans to have all secondary teachers posting gradebook information to the portal. Plant explains, “Thanks to the integrated solution, we are phasing in even more new things, from curriculum-based information to fee-based services. This would be much more difficult if we had adopted incremental solutions with separate portals creating silos of information on the Web.”

Meeting the Interoperability Challenge

For more than eight years, education software developers, vendors, school district technology coordinators, and IT administrators have been discussing the software interoperability challenges facing so many schools. The lack of interoperability creates operational inefficiencies and causes difficult decisions for district technology coordinators responsible for purchasing administrative, educational, and management applications. The Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIFA) was formed to address such issues. SIFA is a nonprofit membership organization comprising more than 100 software vendors, school districts, state departments of education, and other organizations active in the primary through secondary (PK through 12) markets, that have come together to create a set of rules and definitions to enable software programs from different companies to share information. As a founding SIFA organization, and one of the first school districts to incorporate SIF standards, Anoka-Hennepin strives to incorporate SIF standards and support its rules in all its software acquisitions—interoperability played a significant role in the district’s choice of software for A-HConnect.

“Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 integrates identity information from sources throughout our different systems with minimum system interface,” explains Plant. It integrates Anoka-Hennepin’s key directories and applications, and it synchronizes and manages identity information across a number of core applications and discrete directories. “MIIS provides the district with a flexible, easy-to-manage way to bring together information within a heterogeneous environment, giving us a unified view of all known identity information about users, applications, and network resources,” he notes.

Integrating key directories and applications, as well as providing a centralized mechanism to manage identity information across a number of its core applications, reduces security risks and helps administrators with account provisioning and the management of roles and groups. In addition, the password reset functionality in MIIS 2003 greatly reduces time and costs for system administrators serving a population of approximately 41,000 students.

Benefits

Choosing a solution based on Active Directory, MIIS 2003, and HP ProLiant servers has provided Anoka-Hennepin with a Web-based application that is simplifying user access, engaging families more directly in their children’s learning, putting information more readily within the reach of students and faculty as well, and making information management more efficient for IT administrators. A-HConnect currently has approximately 25,760 parents entered into Active Directory; and on a typical school day,  it averages approximately 1,000 unique visits, 16,000 page views, 40,000 total hits, and about 300MB of bandwidth transfer.

Selecting the Right Team

Anoka-Hennepin has a long, successful history with HP, so its IT group knew it could rely on the HP team to design and integrate the comprehensive elements of a new portal solution and streamline the management of it whole account structure. Ted Mondale,

Other information and password management systems that we considered cost considerably more than what our MIIS 2003 and HP solution cost and didn’t offer our required features. Patrick Plant, Director of Technology and Information Services, Anoka-Hennepin School District

Chairman, CEO, and cofounder of Nazca Solutions sums it up by saying, "The HP consulting and integration services team came in, rolled up their sleeves, and got the work done. They were very fast and entrepreneurial, very professional, with good processes—we were glad to be working with them."

Integrating Across Systems

Using MIIS 2003 to synchronize identity information across a variety of heterogeneous directories allows Anoka-Hennepin’s IT administrators to automate the process of updating identity information while maintaining the integrity and ownership of the data—something that could not have been accomplished previously without adding more staff. In addition, with more streamlined connectivity, SQL Server 2000 provides a central repository of information and a single point of management among systems (rather than numerous single feeds). Administrators, therefore, find it much easier to manage identity information as well as to resolve any system problems that might occur. This is improving daily operational management and resulting in better IT support service for end users.

Reducing Parent Telephone Calls

Before deploying A-HConnect, schools within the Anoka-Hennepin School District were receiving an average of 1,000 telephone calls each day in August from parents requesting information about bus routes and other school programs. Now parents can access much of this information online, significantly reducing the requirement for phone calls or helping them gather enough detail to be more focused if they do call the school. This saves the time of school personnel who previously had to conduct some of the research that parents are doing online, so school staff now answer higher-level questions and can redirect some of their time to higher-level tasks.

Minimizing Security Risks

When Anoka-Hennepin allowed public access to its internal data through A-HConnect, it was critical that it be able to maintain the same level of network security it had before deploying the portal. Storing records within MIIS 2003 is helping Anoka-Hennepin comply with security while managing identity information for 75,790 Active Directory accounts. Its provisioning and deprovisioning capabilities allow administrators to manage user account and identity information easily, based on events or changes in status. Security is also provided through the solution’s two Active Directory forests. This allows the ability to manage user identities, role-based, across multiple systems, providing the appropriate access limits for parents, teachers, students, and staff to only certain data systems.

Lowering Administrative Costs and Increasing the Return on Investment

By reducing administration resources previously spent supporting requests for information and managing user identity across multiple systems, these resources can now be directed toward other value-added activities within the district. “Since the district is able to do more with the same funding levels, it can allocate funds to other programs directed at further enhancing the learning process,” notes Plant.
 
In addition to the range of functionality that MIIS 2003 and HP offered, another key reason Anoka-Hennepin selected this solution was cost. Because school districts are increasingly being asked to do more with less, without compromising educational quality, it was important to the district to find a solution that helped it address some of the challenges created by budget restrictions.  “Other information and password management systems that we considered cost considerably more than what our MIIS 2003 and HP solution cost and didn’t offer our required features,” concludes Plant.

For More Information

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For more information about Nazca Solutions, Inc. products and services, call (612) 279-6100 or visit the Web site at: www.nazcainc.com

For more information about Hewlett-Packard (HP) products and services, call (800) 752-0900 or visit the Web site at: www.hp.com

For more information about Anoka-Hennepin School District, call (763) 506-1000 or visit the Web site at:
www.anoka.k12.mn.us

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