One of the major, and commonly over-looked areas of identity management is that of complex multi-campus higher education implementations. There are some similarities to enterprise and government implementations, but there are some major differences. While most identity management solutions are put in place to conform to governance or lower help desk calls, multi-campus identity management implementations are focused around unifying the higher education institution and provide a single repository for all students, staff, and faculty. Multi-affiliation roles in them selves are something that is very unique to higher-ed Identity management projects. The various use-cases that are specific to universities are common among them all. For most companies working on a high-ed contract for the first time, will find this a very challenging and daunting task.  Another topic that is very familiar to these types of engagements are implementors have to work with a governance committee. These committees are comprised of representatives from each institution that have decision making capabilities and are recognized by the high-level corporate sponsor of the project in its entirety. A lot of the time, these committees are formed initially for these projects, so there is also a need to work with them and educate them on how and why these committees work. They are needed, but cause a great deal of delay in a project. Knowing how to work with these committees are necessary for creating a realistic project timeline and for managing expectations with the client on the increased time of deployment. 

One area also that needs to be focused on when working on a University Identity Management deployment is that of software choice. Most companies have a set standard for their software, especially when it comes to Operating Systems (OS’s). You’ll hear of a certain company being regarded as a “Blue company” if they are a big IBM investor. This will mean that you’re servers will most likely be AIX boxes. Others are Wintel (Windows / Intel), so look out for Windows 2003 Server / Active Directory. You’ll also see some Sun or HP companies as well. Higher Education on the other hand doesn’t necessary have the strong hardware tie to a specific vendor. More often than not, you will work with a lot of open-source systems. This means you will be installing on Linux boxes (Redhat’s a biggie), possibly work with OpenLDAP, and all kinds of other fun systems that need a ton of libraries and perl scripts to get to interact with your IdM architecture.

Licensing is another area that’s big with Higher Ed. Most universities get much greater discounts on software than corporations do. This means that when a university purchases an IdM product, they’ve most likely purchased the entire suite. Or rather, they bought Sun Identity Manager and then they just gave them the access control product, there federation tool, and a massive discount to run their SunONE LDAP.

Hopefully this will help some of you out that are starting out on your first higher education identity management deployment. Even if you’ve done them before, I’m sure you can find a little nugget of information that can be beneficial.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment, or send me an email.

Thanks!

.: Adam