March 2003 — Industry Perspective
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Mississippi State Creates New IT Model With Enterprise Identity Management System
In addition, our learners move in and out of the roles defined by the system. For instance, a current student might be considering additional courses in a different field, so he or she is concurrently a "student" and a "prospect." Faculty also have needs for services that transcend the boundaries of those defined by our administrative system. For example, a new faculty member may require access to materials and resources prior to his or her official start date. Also, professional development courses are offered to MSU staff through our WebCT course management system. While the MSU staff roles are defined through our administrative systems, these noncredit, nontraditional courses are not defined.
The institution's new centralized identity management system will allow us to meet the changing and diverse needs of all these users. It will serve as the central point of user identification and authentication for everyone accessing campus systems. Recognizing the roles and access rights for everyone using MSU's Web services is essential to providing a truly customized online experience.
To accomplish this, the identity management system will establish enterprisewide roles for users who transcend any specific application. The system then defines the overall Web services that the university offers through its Web platform, and establishes the business rules and processes for providing those services to the appropriate roles. The system can track the user role by student, faculty, major, alumni or friend, and allows for changes, promotion and crossover in these roles. The SCT Luminis integration architecture provides the enabling framework for implementing this enterprise identity repository.
Real-Time Integration
Finally, the SCT Luminis platform integration technologies add real-time bidirectional data integration technologies to the MSU digital campus project. The Luminis technologies are designed to integrate an institution's disparate systems into a unified whole, including visual and data integration. With these technologies, even multiple systems running on different platforms will appear seamless to users. Equally important, data will flow automatically among applications. For instance, when students update their addresses in the SCT Banner system, it automatically updates it in the library applications and other systems as well.
In the past, we have written a lot of code to facilitate either batch or real-time data transfers as we acquired systems from different vendors. On one occasion, we had to write a specific piece of code that understood SCT Banner Accounts Receivable data, as well as the ticket and decal charges of our parking system. When one of these vendors changed or upgraded their software, we had to review and, often, rewrite our code. This process is repeated with each integrated application.
In addition, the need to create these connections has increased exponentially as more and more services are demanded via the Web. This has created a considerable maintenance issue for our IT staff. To address this issue, the enterprise integration model enables us to build and implement adapters that communicate through a middle messaging layer provided by the SCT Luminis technologies. As a result, we will be able to connect disparate systems and send messages between them, even among non-SCT systems.
As students, faculty and other campus constituents are becoming more tech-savvy, they expect better technology services from their school. When completed, MSU's enterprise identity management and digital campus will give users easier access to our services and opportunities; ultimately, simplifying the lives of our users. The digital campus will provide the technology infrastructure to enable MSU to achieve our goal of establishing life-long learning relationships between the university and its diverse constituents.
Contact Information
SCT Corp.
Malvern, PA
(800) 223-7036
www.sct.com
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