The Fairfax County School District in Virginia, with more than 200 schools and 164,000 students, this week announced it will begin upgrading its legacy network provisioning and password management system with Novell's Identity Manager.

The Fairfax County public schools offer restricted network and application access to staff, contractors and students, as well as a Web portal for parents. According to Ted Davis, director of enterprise information services for the Fairfax County public schools, the Novell Identity Manager software is expected to modernize the largely home-grown provisioning system that’s been in place for several years based on batch scripts for updating lists of new students and staff hires.

“Naturally, things are always changing, and today we have to run this job every night with automated batch scripts we created against the human-resources system,” Davis says. This patchwork batch-scripting process takes place in the separate schools and can be difficult to maintain, he says. “We’re running this batch system all over the place, but the Novell software should be more manageable and less cumbersome.”

The Fairfax County School District selected Novell Identity Manager in a competitive request-for-proposal process that concluded with Novell being awarded a five-year contract worth about $1 million, Davis says. He declined to identify other competitors.

The schools will begin migrating over to Novell Identity Manager next month, with initial access for 30,000 employees, and contractors granted specific rights to use applications or network resources available over the county’s WAN.

Davis noted it could take a few years to migrate the entire user base associated with the school system, whose network includes 90,000 desktops and 1,500 servers running 80 enterprise applications, including human resources, finance, payroll, e-mail transportation management and library records.