March 2003 — Industry Perspective
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Mississippi State Creates New IT Model With Enterprise Identity Management System
Today's learners span a wide range of ages and backgrounds, and their objectives for attending a university are equally varied. In order to support these learners effectively, an institution's infrastructure must be as flexible and fluid as its students.
To address this issue and others, Mississippi State University (MSU) is creating a digital campus with an enterprise identity management system that will meet the changing and varying needs of our constituents. This new IT model will accomplish several important objectives, including:
- Giving constituents better access to our university services and opportunities;
- Providing centralized identity management to address the changing and varied needs of our users; and
- Supporting real-time data integration among all applications.
To create this new model, we are implementing the SCT Luminis platform as the core technology infrastructure. Using it, the university is building a centralized identity management system, integrating our applications to it, then providing personalized and customized content and access to university Web services via a channel-based portal environment.
A Progressive Portal
With the SCT Luminis platform, MSU is adding collaborative tools and personalization capabilities to the institution's Web applications, providing a unified user interface and improving the content of our portals. Adding collaborative tools and personalization capabilities to MSU Web applications is critical to the continued progress and expansion of university services. The new tools we will be offering include personalized channels, calendars, targeted announcements and group tools. In addition, we will be providing a unified user interface to simplify the user experience, ensuring that MSU learners can easily locate and employ university applications.
Another important initiative is guaranteeing that content is centered on the needs and interests of MSU constituents to maintain their interest and usage of the portal. Implementing the SCT Luminis content management system enables us to distribute the entry and management of portal content. This will provide university departments with better tools for managing and controlling content; thus, helping to ensure the quality, timeliness and accuracy of portal information.
Dynamic User Roles
Another core requirement necessary to support the unified digital campus is centralized identity management. This is because MSU constituents are increasingly moving beyond the traditional roles of faculty and students, which are defined by our SCT Banner administrative system. Currently, the SCT Luminis platform provides technologies for enabling a single sign-on to many applications. It also offers data integration for several systems, including WebCT and SCT Banner. While this baseline integration provides significant benefits to the campus, additional functionality is required for the diverse environment and constituency that the digital campus must service.
Nontraditional roles that the Web platform needs to service include prospective students, industry collaborative research partners, MSU Extension Service clients, 4-H'ers and local veterinarians. By providing access to Web services through the portal to constituencies of other universities, research organizations and industries, MSU supports collaboration for research and extension missions. Our current traditional administrative system has no way to categorize these individuals or give them the access they need to interact with the school.
