4-page Case Study - Posted 1/23/2007

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Regis University

Regis University Delivers Anywhere Access to Its Portal, Including Microsoft® SharePoint® Portal Services

Regis University Delivers Anywhere Access to Its Portal, Including Microsoft® SharePoint® Portal Services

Regis University is one of 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. Located in Colorado, Regis University is a leading academic institution with more than 16,000 students.

A nonprofit organization, the university is comprised of three schools: Regis College, the Rueckert-Hartman School for Health Professions and the School for Professional Studies. The university provides undergraduate, graduate and doctor-al degree programs involving coursework that takes place in the classroom and/or online.

Situation

With the Intelligent Application Gateway we were able to deliver a business-driven application access solution while adhering to policy and at the same time maximize our return on our considerable investment in Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server.  Peter Greco CIO Regis University

Regis University was looking for a secure policy driven solution to provide 17,000 faculty, staff and students extranet access to its portal, which is based on Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server 2003. It was critical for the university to leverage its considerable investment in SharePoint to allow secure, cost-effective and consistent operations from any web browser. Ensuring that users had intuitive and convenient access to the applications and the network resources they need to increase their productivity was the priority.

Providing anytime, anywhere access meant that students – through remote online learning as well as on campus – would be accessing coursework, educational materials and personal information from various locations. Therefore, maintaining the integrity of the network and applications was paramount.

“Our mission is to provide a consistent and secure online experience for all visitors regardless of location or personal schedule,” said Peter Greco, CIO, Regis University. “We value our SharePoint implementation and extending the investment was paramount to us. It was critical that students, faculty and staff be able to be productive from anywhere with little or no training or help desk support. For the university, complying with security policy also was key and we wanted to do this without curtailing access or application functionality.” 

The IT team turned to SSL VPN technology with the hope of realizing clientless and extendable access to portal resources. It quickly realized that despite claims to the contrary the majority of SSL VPNs required a client at the endpoint. This was the case because those SSL VPNs did not understand the intricacies of the application, were essentially application agnostic, and could not deliver extranet access to SharePoint at the intended application layer. Instead, these solutions resorted to potentially insecure lower layer tunneling.

Solution

Regis University's search for a secure and convenient solution to extend its significant investment in SharePoint brought the University IT staff to Whale Communications and its Intelligent Application Gateway. Regis University had been looking at ways to provide its faculty, staff and students secure access to its portal from anywhere at anytime.

The university wanted to guarantee complete functionality while ensuring granular policy-based access control and a consistent end-user experience. For Regis University it was paramount that the integrity of its SharePoint Portal Server 2003 implementation and the applications and resources it housed was maintained to deliver a seamless user experience, regardless of location.

The Intelligent Application Gateway, including an optimized module for Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, provided Regis University with full and convenient access at the application layer.

Benefits

Secure, Anywhere SharePoint Access, Maximizing ROI

“SharePoint becomes so much more effective as a rich and collaborative environment due to the convenience, intuitiveness and security offered by the Intelligent Application Gateway,” Greco said. “With this deployment we were able to extend our SharePoint investment to our students, faculty and staff providing anywhere access to the applications and resources they need to be more productive.”

With the Intelligent Application Gateway solution in place, Regis University successfully executed its strategy to leverage its existing SharePoint Portal Server 2003 investment. It now enables secure and easy access to coursework, educational materials and university information from any web-enabled computer.

Upcoming Developments

Regis University will continue to extend its investment in SharePoint by increasing the applications and resources provided through the product. It will utilize its application-intelligent SSL VPN to continue to capitalize on the continued SharePoint investment by delivering those additional applications and resources to its users from anywhere.

“When we selected the Intelligent Application Gateway we were looking for a way to leverage our SharePoint investment. What we found was an intelligent solution that enabled us not only to take advantage of our application infrastructure but also allow us to alter its delivery by customizing the portal's look and feel to provide a more intuitive and user-friendly experience. This has increased collaboration and productivity while enabling us to comply with university policy.  This solution allowed our business needs to drive our access without sacrificing security and without giving in to technology limitations,” Greco said.

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about The White Stone Group products and services, call 865.531.4545 or toll-free 1.800.864-2378 or visit the Web site at:
www.twsg.com

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. 
Document published January 2007