The college, which has 20,000 students enrolled and 1300 staff on six campuses at different locations within counties of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, will work with Salford Software to create one 'active directory' containing user identities in order to ultimately provide generic services and single sign-on across the college regardless of user or campus.
The Identity Management project will see the college allow single authentication by users of the system - meaning that one user name and password will grant access to many systems based upon the user's identity.
"We want to create a great user experience regardless of whether it's for students or staff and irrespective of their location," said Toby George, Head of IT, College of West Anglia.
"It's all part of the progression to become increasingly responsive and innovative, but essentially we'd like to integrate IT systems with local schools and businesses to provide an excellent learning environment which will attract learners to the college.
"Providing state of the art technology is a large part of that process; by creating flexibility and streamlining our internal systems, we will improve user experience whilst also reducing costs."
As part of the migration strategy, Salford Software will upgrade all the existing Novell Netware and Microsoft systems to Microsoft\'s Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007 platforms. This will provide a distributed, resilient | foundation for the Colledge IT infrastructure.
Salford Software is not tied to the products of one supplier and always endeavours to identify the most suitable and cost effective solution for the customer. In this case Novell's ZENworks Configuration Management v10 was identified as the best desktop management solution as it will leverage the college\'s existing investment.
For the data migration project itself, a combination of custom scripting, Quest's NDS Migrator and Novell\'s Identity Manager will be used to provide a seamless transition for the College Staff.
Behind the scenes, Salford Software will also work with the college to review and enhance their existing server virtualisation platform. This will greatly reduce the number of physical servers located at the college, whilst increasing reliability and performance.
"The virtualisation project will mean that we can physically reduce the number of servers within the college which from a cost point of view means we will significantly reduce the cost of replacement, energy costs and the need for 'cooling' - whilst from an environmental point of view, the impact will also be much less." said Toby George.
"We chose to work with Salford Software based on its plan being the best cost effective solution for our needs, but also because it is the best placed in terms of responsiveness, breadth of skills associated with this project and knowledge of our market place."
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