Studentnet® Cloudburst

28 September 2015

Studentnet has been working hard enhancing the value of Cloudwork by integrating with more of the software that you use in your school. New innovative software apps are being actively developed and deployed within schools every week. Often these apps are filling a new need being generated by a multitude of pressures on schools such:
  • Greater demands from parents for more information and involvement
  • A rapidly changing compliance and governance environment
  • New technical opportunities being made available due to ubiquitous mobile devices and now the Internet of Things (IoT)
  • Always on, 24x7 service delivery

Often these new apps do not fit comfortably into the existing identity and directory configurations established in traditional local network architectures. For instance many new services are oriented to mobile devices and want to use new mobile device oriented authentication protocols such as OAuth2 and OpenID Connect neither of which are supported in a standard traditional local network directory configuration.

Studentnet is committed to keeping Cloudwork up to date to the highest level of integration possible with these new and innovative applications. In this month's edition of Cloudburst we are summarising some recent successes working with the exciting new breed of innovative application developers.

Synergetic & Schoolbox Account Integration

Synergetic and Schoolbox already achieve a high level of account integration working directly together. Cloudwork enhances that integration by being able to directly extract account information out of Synergetic into the Cloudwork Identity Manager (CwIM) so eliminating the need for cumbersome CSV file extractions. In addition our CwIM provides authentication services to Schoolbox ensuring completely smooth identity management/authentication between all three products. This set up is particularly useful for parent accounts as there is now no need for the parent accounts to ever be stored in the school's on network directory service.

Elcom Integrated Authentication

Studentnet is proud to announce our first production deployment of integrated authentication services for Elcom. This facility has now moved out of beta testing. It is now fully deployed and working in production at our first school. Studentnet has worked closely with both Elcom and the initial school to establish a custom release that fully supports integrated authentication and credential management.

Complispace

Studentnet fully supports Complispace's integrated automatic account provisioning and maintenance features by fully exploiting Complispace's rich SAML assertion format. The additional identity information packed into this format ensures fully automated account provisioning and maintenance between Cloudwork and Complispace. This identity information rich SAML assertion format is not supported in standard directory federated services.

Canvas Integration: Account & Course Provisioning

Studentnet is proud to announce that our initial implementation of course and account provisioning in Cloudwork is now close to completion. The feature is about to enter our internal alpha-test phase. We are seeking schools to act as beta testers from within our community of active Canvas users.

SEQTA

A significant milestone has been reached with our support for SEQTA: we have now completed the first test deployment of SEQTA into our Cloudlab test environment. Our initial tests of integrated authentication have been completed in conjunction with the SEQTA development team with whom Studentnet has worked closely. Both teams are now exploring further levels of integration that can be achieved between the two products.

Welcome Sentral, Verso App, Busminder, Edval, MyEDiary and Rubicon Atlas

Every week schools are asking Studentnet to establish new working relationships with applications that are important to their environments. Studentnet welcomes exploring new ways that we can increase identity integration with every new developer to whom we are introduced. In particular we offer developers:
  • free access to deep technical expertise, and
  • free provision of a test Identity Provider (IdP) service within which they can thoroughly test their newly developed authentication and provisioning features.
This month Studentnet has been introduced or commenced working with Sentral, Verso App, Busminder, Edval, MyEDiary and Rubicon Atlas. For a complete list of services that you can integrate into your school's operation please visit our Services page. Got a new app that you want integrated with your school? Contact Studentnet to introduce us to the application or developer and we'll get the ball rolling!

Best Regards
The Studentnet Team

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