UMRA – Aeries SIS Active Directory Automation

Aeries Student Information System (SIS) is one of many Student managing systems high schools, middle schools, and other colleges use to mange there students in there schools. One of the benefits of using such a system is having one central place to manage your student’s information on a yearly basis. However, when it comes to a new school year, or updates in your student information system, sometimes it’s a hard and tedious task to update our Active Directory with these changes. These are the challenges our clients face with they are using the Aeries SIS and need to create new student accounts, with special group permissions, home drives, profile path, even exchange, Google, or hotmail accounts. Setting up these accounts each year can take weeks, however using UMRA Automation you can now have any changes in your Aeries SIS replicated out to Active Directory on a daily, hourly, etc basis. What do I mean you ask? Simple, with UMRA Automation you can now either take a snap shot of the all the students status in Aeries, and then compare that against Active Directory. So for example, if your Aeries SIS just updated Joe Fox’s first name to Joey, when you run your UMRA Automation it will now see that in Active Directory, Joe Fox’s first name is Joe, however in the Aeries SIS its Joey, and UMRA Automation will update that active Directory account. Now, this is an example of a simple attribute change, UMRA Automation can look at any aspect of the Students Active Directory account. So you can check grade level, group memberships, home folder status etc. If any of this is different then whats in your Aeries SIS, then UMRA Automation can now move the student, update the student etc. Below is a quick way to get this process started.

UMRA – Aeries SIS Active Directory Automation How To

To get this process started first you will need to download the trial version of UMRA > http://www.tools4ever.com/download/. Once you have that downloaded, lets get everything started. Below are some very high level steps on how this process goes.

Step 1:
You will need to create a view of all students in your Aeries Student Information System.

Step 2:
Create a new UMRA Automation Script this script should connect to this view with a Gerneric Table action. You will then loop through this table, and update your SQL temp holding table with. Once this is done, you can now put this script on a hourly, daily, weekly basis to grab your Aeries view, and update your SQL database with the latest.

Step 3:
With another UMRA Automation Script you will now check all records in your Temp SQL if there are records in the database that are “active” and there is no student account in Active Directory, you script should create that account. Then on the flip side, if there is an account in active directory, that is in your Aeries SIS, then run a compare on that account, check firstame, lastname, grade, school, location, etc.

So I hope this give some of you an idea out there of how this process would work with getting your Aeries Student Information system on an automated schedule to provision and create student accounts.

Blog update - July 25th 2009
So I've decieded to go back through some of my old blogs and update them with a little more information now some of the details on these Student Information System SIS Autiomation syncs with Active Directory. Most of the time, I will give you a quick overview of how these work at a very high level, since there are many details on the lower level scripts that doe the work. So In each of my SIS connectors for Active Directory I will be going in detail on the connection to the database, and the different methods I've seen for each, as well as give you a good idea of what you will need for data when you are trying to sync up your SIS with AD. So lets get down to some details.. Now most of the time with we use UMRA for our automation projects, the data of the students or staff is always the most critical, since withouth this data we really dont have anything to sync up. Now, I've seen 2 scenarios mostly in my deployments, one is that the client already has students in active directory, and one where there are no students in active directory. If the users has students in active directory, make sure you check first to see how those students are related to the Aeries SIS system. Now, sometimes we get lucky where the ID of the student (samaccountname / login name) is the student ID created by aeiries, or there is an uniuqe identifer in the acccount somewhere, maybe employeeid. Why is this so vital? Well, if the students are already in Active Directory, you are half way done, all you will need to do is link up the students data in your data, and then bind to that user by the attribute in Active Directory. Now, if the client doesnt have this link, then you will need to either have them create these, and add them to an account, or run a UMRA to find the students and add these ID's to the accounts. Now the only problem with this is...how can you be certain the "Joe Fox" in your SIS, is the same "Joe Fox" in your Active Directory? In most cases like this we just end up recreating the accoutns with unique ID's or linking as much data as we can on the account, before we actually run an update with UMRA. In most cases, we typicaly get a "SQL View" to get a dataset directly from the Aeries SIS sytem, if we dont get a View, then you can contct your Aeireis Datbase hoster, and ask them to give you a daily CSV dump of your students and there information. Here is a quick list of items we typically get in your view, with this data UMRA should be able to run a sync smoothly. StudentID, FirstName, LastName, Status, School,Grade,AUP. StudentID is self explanitory, this is the studentid that is generated by the Aeries system, you can use this as there account / login name of active directory, since these are unique, there will be no duplication issues. First Name and Last Name will be added to the account, so both of these are straight forward. Status, will be there current status, "w" for withdrawn, "a" for an active live student, and "g" for graduated, somttimes these will be mapped to the exact type, but if they provide single letter you now know what they stand for. So next will be school, this will be the school they attend, this can come as the complete school name, or the 3 letter prefix. Grade will be the grade of the student. AUP is typically if they have a internet use policy, or network policy form signed, if this is set to "y" or "n" then you will give them a specific group membership to allow internet etc. This are the most comon fields that i see when we are given data in a view to work with. Now keep in mind this is some of the basics of the data, sometimes you can get more depending on what you wnat to do with your sync.