UMRA – TIES SIS Active Directory Student Automation at 9:19 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 – TIES SIS Active Directory Student Automation

TIES, 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 TIES 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 TIES Now, in some cases you might not have your TIES 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 TIES 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 TIES Student Information Sync works.

Step 1
Get your data. As stated above this can be multiple ways, CSV, View from the database, etc. In most cases if your TIES SIS is hosted with you, you can connect directly to the database, and create yourself a view, or combine a bunch of tables together with joins until you get the data you need.

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 your main projects done, you can now go back and add logging / auditing into your scripts. Most of the time I will save these until last, however you can also do these while creating your other scripts to speed up the process. Why would you need logging you might ask? Anytime your script edits an object in AD, it could be a create user, move user, updating / changing an attribute, you will want to keep a history of this, that way you can go back a few months from now, and see the history of changes etc. to your users and objects in active directory.

Step 5
Now that you have all your processes really, create 1 main UMRA Automation project to call your smaller projects in succession. Dont forget to take out any starter projects such as INIT projects that have global variables in them, since you wont need to call these projects except for 1 time in the begginging of ryour run.

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