Customer

The Bryant School District currently serves approximately 7,800 students in the city of Bryant, Arkansas and its surrounding communities. Known as “a new town with a traditional all-American community” where “commercial retail has boomed,” our population and community growth, low unemployment rates, and incredible community involvement recently earned Bryant a spot on CNN’s Money Magazine Top 100 “Best Places to Live” in America. The District itself is comprised of ten individual schools: seven elementary schools, two middle schools, and 1 high school where approximately 400-450 students graduate each year.

Challenges

Running a single sign-on environment in G Suite* prohibited users from being able to manage expiration of their Active Directory. With over 9000 email users, Bryant Schools was looking for a more efficient way to provision its users to G Suite while retaining alignment between the new cloud platform and existing workflows.

Solution

SADA Systems was engaged to develop a tool that allows a user to manage expiration of their passwords in a process that emulates related functionality of Active Directory. This tool enables SADA’s SSO solution to more closely reflect password-related account statuses and/or policies present in the current Active Directory.

In addition, SADA helped implement requests from Bryant Schools such as a custom branded SSO log-in page, password expiration notifications, easy change password links and automatic periodic user provisioning based on group membership.

Result

With the help of SADA’s custom user provisioning tools, Bryant Schools was able to migrate 9000 users to G Suite in record time. Strong project management from both sides kept the migration and deployment on schedule. Tait Shrum, IT Director at Bryant School District says “[SADA’s] management team was great, and their support team and programmers made this project a success. Thanks, SADA!”

Bryant Schools was able to enhance their G Suite experience with SADA’s G Suite application such as the User Renamer for G Suite and Authentication Magic for G Suite (password sync solution). Shrum asked: “How would we rename them when the time comes? How would we ease the strain on users by syncing passwords with our internal directory service?” As teachers get married, leave or retire, curriculums and other important documents need to be preserved. The User Renamer allowed IT staff to quickly and easily change names so documents can be accessed with brand new user names. In contrast, Authentication Magic for G Suite helped IT administrators manage user credentials, password changes, and locks-outs by syncing Active Directory credentials to G Suite.

Note: At the time of this case study, G Suite was known as Google Apps