UMRA – Zangle SIS Active Directory Student Automation at 8:27 PM

If you haven’t already, please read my first post on where and how to download a trial version of User Management Resource Administrator, developed by tools4ever. UMRA

Download Trial Version of UMRA> http://www.tools4ever.com/download/
Download Trial Version of SSRPM > http://www.tools4ever.com/download/

UMRA – Zangle SIS Active Directory Student Automation

Zangle, is another popular Student Information System (SIS) our clients want to get an automatic sync with UMRA Automation to Active Directory (AD). Sync you ask? Yes, UMRA Automation can connect to the Zangle Student Information System in multiple ways. In most cases, we are able to do a direct ODBC database connection, and either through a view, or custom query string, we can get all students, and there information. From this information, we are able to compare this data agsinsts whats in Active Directory. This process can be put on automated schedule, to run every hour, day, week etc. in most cases we see our clients run this nightly to make sure the data in Active Directory is in sync with Zangle Now, in some cases you might not have your Zangle SIS hosted on your network, it might be hosted somewhere else. This is ok, most of the time, these companies will create you a view in the Zangle SIS you can call from within UMRA Automation project, with read only access. Or, they can provide you with a nightly CSV data dump. Either way, UMRA Automation can handle all of these different type of data retrieval types. So what can you sync, I bet is the next question you might be asking. UMRA Automation can really sync up any data that is provided in your database view, check student graduation years, student locations, student first name, last name, group memberships etc. Below is a quick overview of how a typical Zangle Student Information Sync works.

Step 1
Get your data. As stated above this can be multiple ways, CSV, View from the database, etc.

Step 2
With a UMRA Automation project, create a loop to check all the users in your data source checking for only new accounts. You can do this by checking for the student ID, or your identifier, if that is in AD go to the next record, if it’s a new record that needs to be in AD, create the account, create a home folder, create a profile path, create an email account, etc.

Step 3
With another UMRA Automation project, get all the student accounts in Active Directory and run them against the data source of students. If a user is in AD and in your SIS, then run a compare, check firstname, lastname, location etc. If a user is not in the right location, or grade move the account. Strip group membership; reapply group memberships based on new location, move home drives, and email mail stores if needed.

Step 4
Now that you have all your processes really, create 1 main UMRA Automation project to call your smaller projects in succession.

I hope this gives some of you out there an idea of how to get your students from Zangle into Active Directory.