4-page Case Study - Posted 4/23/2009

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St Margaret's Anglican Girls School

New Portal Technology Creates fresh Opportunities for School Extranet

St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School is an independent day and boarding school located near Brisbane, Australia. It has about 860 students aged between 5 and 18. The school had a secure internet portal which served as a gateway for on-site internet access and an authentication point for remote access to internal school systems, such as class scheduling, budgeting and school results. However, the existing portal was unstable, it was inaccessible to third-party vendors and IT staff required external support if they wanted to make new internal applications available. In 2008, the school’s gateway failed completely. Within a matter of days, Data#3 had installed and configured Microsoft® Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 as a temporary solution, restoring remote access to off-site parents, staff and students. St Margaret’s decided to purchase the product, and has suffered no outages since. It has rapidly published new extranet services that promote more sophisticated and transparent communication with the school community. A dedicated vendor portal has also drastically simplified third-party application support.

Situation

Founded in 1895, St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School is an independent school located in Ascot, near the Queensland capital, Brisbane. It currently has approximately 860 students engaged in studies from preparatory level to Year 12, with nearly 175 boarding at the school.

Throughout Christmas and New Year, staff were coming back to me and saying how delighted they were...” Tony Leyland, IT Manager, St Margaret’s.

Staff, students and parents accessed the network remotely through a dedicated St Margaret’s portal, which also served as the secure gateway through which on-site students accessed the internet. On average, the portal managed about 800 remote connections per day, and was seen as a critical component in the school’s ability to function flexibly and provide important information to a wide audience.

Although the portal application provided security, it was unreliable, and IT staff were wary of making additional demands on it.

“The system kept failing,” says Tony Leyland, IT Manager, St Margaret’s. “On average, this would happen every two to three weeks during the school day. It would take us about an hour to get the portal up again, during which time neither staff nor students could access the internet. This had a big impact on teaching.”

The portal would also fail approximately once every five weekends, which meant Tony having to drive onto school premises to restart the application.

The gateway system was also not suited to providing access to third parties, making vendor support difficult. If any of the school’s applications suffered a malfunction, vendors would either have to visit the school in person or to tell St Margaret’s IT staff how to fix the problem over the phone.

Given that the school wanted to make more internal applications available to external users – for example, school calendars to parents – the IT department began to research alternative solutions to providing a secure gateway for St Margaret’s. In late 2008, the school asked Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Data#3 to assist.

Solution

St Margaret’s IT staff had a number of criteria for the solution. For their own control and confidence, they wanted edge security from a physical appliance and they wanted simplicity, preferring one server to two.

“It also needed to co-exist with the current Novell environment,” says Leyland. “That meant it had to fit smoothly with Novell’s eDirectory log-in authentication and Microsoft’s Active Directory®, which we will convert to at the end of 2009.

“It was also very important for us that our external users had as smooth a passage as possible when logging on. Finally, we had to be able to set authentication for different levels of security according to the application and the user.”

By November, St Margaret’s was beginning to hone its ideal solution in cooperation with Data#3 staff. At this point, however, the school’s existing gateway application suffered a catastrophic failure.

“We simply couldn’t get it operational again,” says Leyland. “Suddenly we couldn’t provide any external access.”

When the existing system failed completely, school IT staff arranged an urgent meeting with Data#3, who believed that Microsoft’s Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 answered St Margaret’s immediate and future needs.

“They brought a laptop and showed us all the functionality of Intelligent Application Gateway in a virtual environment, so we could see exactly how it worked,” says Leyland.

“With the failure of the existing portal, we offered Tony a ‘try-before-you-buy’ proof of concept,” says John Griffin, Data#3 Solutions Specialist. “We were sufficiently confident in it, that we loaned the necessary hardware in the belief we wouldn’t be taking it out. Basic portal functionality was implemented in hours, with a fully functional replacement up and running in a matter of days.”

The IAG application was installed, and access to internal applications restored via group permissions. However, IAG 2007 also enabled St Margaret’s to simplify the log-in process so that it was more intuitive and was identical irrespective of whether staff were logging on internally or externally.

“The proof of concept was a loan device – it had to go back,” says Leyland. “As a permanent solution, it would certainly be a big investment. But the team that Data#3 sent showed us the full functionality and what it would enable us to do, specifically in terms of developing and supporting a more sophisticated portal.”

Once the proof of concept had restored pre-existing functionality, the Data#3 team started to develop some of these extra functions, such as separate portals for specific internal applications. The temporary solution proved sufficiently effective to sway the investment decision.

“We decided to purchase it,” says Leyland. “Transferring the configuration from the loan device to the new one took no time at all.”

Benefits

Microsoft’s Intelligent Application Gateway provided immediate relief to technical support staff and a welcome service upgrade to staff, students and parents. Reliability improved, remote access increased and support staff immediately began to develop new applications for the school’s portal.

An end to outages

Since the proof of concept was installed in November 2008, the St Margaret’s portal has not suffered a single failure. Staff and students now enjoy uninterrupted remote access to the school’s internal applications.

“Throughout Christmas and New Year, staff were coming back to me and saying how delighted they were with the process for remotely logging on,” says Leyland. “The old interface was clunky and not streamlined. Now, when you log on remotely, you go straight to the intranet and people see the same thing whether they are logging on to the portal internally or externally. This makes it easier to use. People who didn’t even know me have sought me out to thank me.” Improved ease of access has resulted in increased portal usage. Parental access to student results sites has doubled since the new gateway was installed and overall traffic volumes are up by half.

A broader service

St Margaret’s has also increased its ability to respond to staff and student demand for a more comprehensive portal. “Our old system made it very cumbersome to get new stuff onto the portal,” says Leyland. “IAG is simply a much better web publishing tool. We can offer other services through IAG because they are so much easier to set up.”

Since deploying the gateway in November, St Margaret’s has added a school calendar application that details major school events such as sporting fixtures and church services. IT staff have also created a ‘Café Space’ for student-generated content and a ‘Parents’ Lounge’ that provides an opportunity for parents to analyse students’ results in detail.

“With our old system we had to manipulate two servers to do this,” says Leyland. ”And in any case, even adding one new service would have been a big job requiring an external resource and a hefty cost. Now it’s just straightforward. We can publish new services in a couple of hours.”

Easier support

For St Margaret’s IT staff, the IAG server is a much easier tool to support than its predecessor. It also makes support easier for third-party vendors. “It used to be much more difficult getting third-party vendors onto our network to trouble-shoot or rectify problems with specific applications,” says Leyland. “With IAG, we have created an extra portal just for vendor support, with its own URL and home page.

“If there is a problem with any of our applications, they just log on and it’s easy for them to fix. We set the authorisations to allow them access just to their applications and they don’t have to come on site. This not only means a faster resolution, it also eliminates the call-out fee.”

Confidence in security

Staff are confident that the increased traffic between internal and external systems will not compromise security, and that their internal systems are safe.

“The way IAG works, the connections from the outside world are terminated at the gateway server, where they are replicated, and then passed on to the internal servers and applications. So if there is a bogus request, it is stopped.”

Lastly, by providing more sophisticated and easier-to-use services, St Margaret’s has differentiated itself from other schools. Leyland attributes this achievement to the functionality of the IAG product, and the staff who helped deploy it at such short notice.

“It’s been an absolute pleasure working with professionals of such high calibre,” he says.

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

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

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, please call 13 2058 or go to: www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/appv/ default.mspx

For more information about Data#3 products and services, call 1300 23 28 23 or visit the Web site at: www.data3.com.au

For more information about St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School products and services, call 07 3862 0777 or visit the Web site at: http://www.stmargarets.qld.edu.au