* RedSpider runs identity management for 12 colleges in the Netherlands
For some reason, the Dutch have always been at the forefront of innovation with Novell products. Well, the Dutch and colleges in the Carolinas. I’m not saying the Dutch (as well as Duke, Wake Forest and UNC) do all the innovation, just that they seem to do the most “interesting” stuff. Usually it was one of the Novell user groups (NUI affiliates) in The Netherlands, but the latest news comes out of a consortium of colleges in the land of cheese and wooden shoes.
RedSpider is a system designed by the IT departments of several nonprofit community colleges in the Netherlands, and now runs identity management systems for 12 colleges. The system provisions user accounts for more than 150,000 staff and students across the Netherlands.
The Dutch nonprofit community college network provides vocational courses for students. As many of these are short courses, admissions systems must be able to accept students all year round, not just at the start of the academic term, and student turnover is high.
Like many a higher education establishment, these community colleges invested heavily in Novell technology, especially NetWare and eDirectory. Still, creating new student accounts was labor-intensive, as data entered into a college’s eDirectory database had to be manually transferred to other systems. New users were added to the database only once a week, and when demand was high, it might take three weeks for an account to be fully activated. There was no simple way to delete an account when a student left the college, so vacant identities consumed resources and compromised security.
The IT departments of a number of the schools recognized the problem and launched a collaborative effort (helped by Novell consulting) to design a solution before the issues became unmanageable. They created RedSpider, a collaborative organization run by the IT department of the individual colleges, to provide a user account management system based on Novell Identity Manager. Where it previously could take three weeks to activate an account, it now can be done within 24 hours. According to RedSpider President Rene Visser, “The creation and deletion of accounts and the need to reset forgotten passwords used to occupy one person for five days a week. Now we only need to spend half a day on these tasks – a 90% improvement.”
Read the whole story of RedSpider at Novell’s Web site. See if it’s applicable to you and your circumstances. But even if it isn’t, it’s a nice affirmation that NetWare and Novell can still be relevant.
