Hi Mark,

We've used Novell IDM for many years to automatically provision new student accounts directly from our student record system. It's been a fairly good process for us and generates thousands of accounts each year. Homedrives/email etc are all provisioned as part of creating the new account. As we've recently moved to Active Directory we are in the early stages of implementing Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) to auto provision both student accounts from our student record system and staff accounts direct from the HR system. 

Both IDM and FIM are quite complex to setup in the first instance but should be configurable to talk to your student record system. I suspect self registration would be a nightmare so I'd definitely go with something that talks to your main student registration/record database as a preference. The only issues we tend to have are with people changing courses before their record is updated and occasional issues with automatic password generation for new accounts. If you did want to go the portal route I'm fairly sure IDM and FIM would both support output from web sources in the same way we feed them information from a database. I'm unsure how you would check the validity of the information the student picked for their account without it doing some kind of lookup against your student database.

I don't tend to like plugging consultants but we have used Salford Software http://www.salfordsoftware.co.uk/ for our supporting our identity systems and they are generally good, they might be a good starting point if you wanted to look into a full integrated solution or at least worth picking their brains as to what would suit your environment, my guess would be Microsoft FIM as a first choice.

If you want more info on how we currently use IDM I can pass you over to one of the guys who looks directly after that system.

Stuart

Stuart Gould
Infrastructure Solutions Specialist
IT Services
Edge Hill University
Ormskirk
T: 01695 650884
E: [log in to unmask]
W: http://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/techservices/


>>> "Mark D. B. Humphrys" <[log in to unmask]> 08/10/2012 14:54 >>>
Folks,

Could anyone advise me as to possible solutions for automatically creating active directory accounts and email addresses, home folders etc, through a self-service portal?

We've reached a point where incoming student numbers outstrips our ability to create accounts etc., in time for enrolment (we do use DSADD etc but all the paperwork with the details takes the time along with the ID cards etc ).  I would like to look at the possibility of using some form of identity management system that students could effectively create their own accounts through an online portal, perhaps uploading passport photo images (that could be used for ID card purposes etc) at the same time.  I am guessing that they could access the portal as soon as they have been accepted at the University and by logging in create the account etc, or rather simply change the password to an account already created through the enrolment process.

We are using SITS and eVision as our student information system and Windows 2003/2008 Active Directory domain and Exchange 2010.

We've never looked at this before as it's never been needed so I'm just trying to find out how others may be tackling it.

Many thanks

Mark


Mark D. B. Humphrys
IT Services Manager
Norwich University College of the Arts
Francis House
3-7 Redwell Street
Norwich
NR2 4SN

DDI:  01603 756266
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