Tools4ever Solutions for Education

Tools4ever can provide solutions for many of the challenges school districts encounter with their User Account Management process:

1. Productivity: Our solutions improve productivity and efficiency. Less time spent on routine matters means more time for impactful IT projects.
2. Implementation: Quick implementation time helps eliminate the cost associated with extended project implementations.
3. Financial: Cost savings are easily achieved by automating your user lifecycle processes.

Nothing is more important than providing your students with the correct access to the right resources. Our provisioning solutions automate the entire user account lifecycle. By linking to the student information system, new students will receive their accounts, access rights, and other resources on the first day of school.

Then, when students change grade levels or courses, our solutions ensure they receive the correct rights and licenses. But what happens when a student graduates or leaves the school district? Provisioning automatically blocks or deactivates their account to prevent unnecessary access to applications and systems.

Provisioning can usually be implemented within a few weeks, which eliminates the cost associated with extended project implementations by managing all processes through a modern user interface. Additional cost savings are easily achieved by automating your user lifecycle processes, such as creating, modifying, and deleting student accounts.

HelloID and NIM provide fully automated provisioning, flexible self-service, and secure access management. Intuitive interfaces, mapped data, and easy integration with your systems and applications grant you superior management control.

With HelloID as a cloud IDaaS platform or NIM as an on-premise platform, you can streamline and simplify all of your identity management efforts. Secure your IT environment and enable your students and staff. Our solutions are supported by highly trained support staff and dedicated documentation websites for easy self-management.

Among other benefits, HelloID and NIM offer the following:

• “Do-it-Yourself” model allows 80% lower cost vs. Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, Ping, etc.
• HelloID is 100% cloud-native — no hardware or physical infrastructure is required.
• NIM is on-premise — designed for performance with large data sets and complex multisystem environments.
• Tools4ever’s provisioning solutions — based on 20 years of market leadership.

Our IDM solutions enable the provisioning, self-service, delegation, and governance of staff and student accounts. They automate the entire user lifecycle by integrating with leading education source and target systems such as

• Active Directory
• Google Workspace
• Aeries
• AWS
• Blackboard
• Canvas
• eSchoolData
• HMH
• Infinite Campus
• Office 365
• OneRoster
• PowerSchool
• Skyward
• Synergy
• And many others.

Centralizing user account lifecycle management makes managing and executing provisioning and administrative tasks easy. All the while retaining the flexibility to manage ad hoc single-user provisioning tasks. For example:

• Create, update, move, disable, and delete staff and student accounts
• Manage groups and home directories
• Access Governance, workflow management, helpdesk delegation
• Tailor-made provisioning-oriented web forms

Our IDM solutions offer a quick, complete, and affordable solution for dealing with the yearly exodus of students graduating, the influx of new students, and the constant shifting of students from one school to another.

The manual management of thousands of staff and student user accounts with constant shifting needs can push small IT departments to the breaking point. Their method for managing accounts—developing/maintaining scripts and manually updating accounts—often cannot keep up with the flow of student movement. Also, helpdesks are often overwhelmed with password-related calls.

Other common problems include:

• The existence of CSV text files to handle student information.
• The removal of all obsolete student accounts, including home directories.
• Creating new user accounts for all incoming students, including usernames, home directories, share folders, and all other attributes.
• The implementation of a simple and secure method for password resets.
• Reporting on all password changes and all users.
• Unique naming conventions across multiple systems

Dealing with these problems results in an immediate return on investment through time saved, improved efficiency, and increased security.

The management of all user accounts in Active Directory, and downstream target systems is often an entirely manual process creating enormous inefficiencies. This typically results in human error and inconsistent standards within the school district. In addition, homegrown scripts do nothing to simplify the situation or help with the management of accounts in other applications, such as Renaissance Learning, Riverdeep, Orchard, and Easy Grade Pro.

Rules and regulations are always evolving regarding the digital student user lifecycle, such as Personal Identifiable Information (PII), student data privacy, distant learning, and Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning. All of these requirements increase the complexity of school districts’ student lifecycle ecosystems. In some cases, environments are found to be inadequate just days or weeks before a new school year. Therefore, IT departments need an easy-to-implement and flexible self-manageable solution to be configured to meet the ever-changing digital student user lifecycle needs.

Tools4ever’s IDM solutions were designed to solve the digital student user lifecycle management problem. Integrating our solutions with common applications such as PowerSchool can automate your school’s provisioning and deprovisioning processes. Our solutions compare data between the SIS and target systems on a schedule. When changes are detected, they are synchronized to the appropriate downstream systems, such as changes made to an email, username, phone number, and entitlements. As a result, these changes are completed automatically, on schedule, and every step is logged for audit purposes.

Our IDM solutions improves security by utilizing role models and business rules based on RBAC. This guarantees that staff and student entitlements are assigned based on models and rules previously designed by senior IT or security officers.

In addition, automation automatically disables or deletes accounts when a staff or student is no longer active in the HR or SIS. IT departments no longer have to manually adjust entitlements or wait for notifications to disable or delete accounts.

All this results in increased security and efficiency, with secure entitlements and prompt account offboarding. The time saved by automating the provisioning process means that IT departments can focus on more strategic IT initiatives.

School districts continuously see high turnover as students move up grade levels and graduate. This poses a challenge for IT departments as onboarding, and offboarding student accounts can lead to many manual tasks that decrease productivity and create security risks for your district.

At the same time, Student Data Privacy Laws require all school districts to enforce complete protection of student information records. While your district may have put standard procedures and solutions in place to assist in these efforts, sometimes, this is not enough. For example, school districts have become a prime target for ransomware attacks as many attackers have realized the value of a student’s personal information to the school district.

Security processes like Multifactor Authentication (MFA) can help solve this common problem.

Multifactor Authentication (MFA) is a security process that requires two or more separate steps for a user to prove their identity. A combination of requirements allows the user to gain access to resources. At the district level, this combination of criteria is described as something your student knows (login credentials), something they have (QR code or One-Time Password (OTP)), and their location (at school).

Pairing MFA with Single Sign-On (SSO) provides an extra layer of security that dramatically decreases the risk of a ransomware attack on your district.

HelloID provides a dashboard accessible by Single Sign-On and protected with the market’s most current and advanced MFA options. MFA options include Email, SMS, FIDO2, Push to Verify, OTP, and more.

HelloID already integrates with many Student Information Systems like Skyward, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, and others. Furthermore, HelloID, with multifactor authentication, can be configured at both the dashboard and individual application levels to protect your student data securely. As a result, provisioning paired with single sign-on and MFA can improve any school district’s user management ecosystem.