Customer
Acadiana Technical College (ATC) is comprised of seven separate campuses: Acadian, TH Harris, Teche Area, Lafayette, Charles B. Coreil, Evangeline and Gulf Area. ATC is a complex mix of challenging academics, hands-on career programs and unique opportunities that allow students to pursue interests both on and off campus. The college offers on-campus and online instruction of multiple vocational and technical courses . ATC focuses on delivering instructional programs which provide skilled employees for business and industry that contribute to the overall economic development and workforce needs of Louisiana.
Challenge
The college had previously been operating under one umbrella domain, but wanted to slowly transition to having Google Apps set up for each separate college domain. This required migrating email, contact and calendar data from the college’s old domain to seven separate new domains. Each migration required a custom SSO page with password sync capabilities similar to what was previously available.
Louisiana state dictates that educational institutions such as Acadiana Technical College must provide secure log-ins for faculty and staff. Acadiana Technical College required an SSO capable, custom log-in page that displayed the university’s logo and connected faculty and staff to the university’s other portals.
Solution
Acadiana Technical College had already been an existing SADA Systems hosted single sign-on customer. As a trusted vendor, the college network engaged SADA to deliver single-sign on capabilities for the Acadiana campuses. During the process, SADA focused on:
Deploying a hosted, custom-designed SSO page for new email which allowed users to log into Google Apps with the same credentials as the LDAP server.
Simplifying user management for administrators so all users can be fully managed from the existing LDAP based data system
Ensuring a secure and full encrypted communication channel between SADA’s hosted system and Acadiana’s servers.
Result
With only minimal help required from Acadiana’s IT resources, SADA was able to provide the entire solution from discovery to design, testing, and full deployment. Now, when someone attempts to access any Google Apps related links, they are directed to the custom log-in page with Acadiana’s logo and seal. Nothing is visible to the public without authentication.
SADA’s custom Google Apps password sync solution allows faculty and staff to use their mobile devices and IMAP/POP-based access with the same password they already use. With the rising increase of iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and other smart phone usage, the ability to sign in to school email via mobile devices has become invaluable to ATC faculty and staff.
“We have been using them for several years for our Google hosted Single Sign-On Services they have done a great jobs, so when we changed our college email SADA Systems was our choice.” praises Dale Thibodeaux.
About Google Apps Partner SADA Systems
SADA Systems, Inc. (https://www.sada.com) is a privately held information technology consulting, outsourcing, and development firm founded in 2000. SADA started as a Google partner for its search technology, and is proud to be one of the world’s first 10 Google Apps partners, having participated in the Google Apps official launch campaign in February of 2007. SADA is highly experienced in Google Apps migration, implementation and deployment for the enterprise, education, non profit and government sector.
