Jeff Nuckolls {Cloud Connoisseur & Chief Innovation Officer} - All Comments

re: Synchronize Active Directory to ADAM with ADAMSync (step-by-step)

Lepide — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:34:24 GMT

In my day-to-day role as the CIO for Westminster College, my team and I are always looking for ways to make our lives–and the lives of our users–a little easier. Recently, we had a request to provide more granular email distribution lists. At the time of the request, we had just three main lists - one for students, one for faculty and one for staff. The desire was to have lists based on dorm residency, fraternity membership and major/minor. So far, we’ve nailed downthe first two with ease.

We decided very early on that maintaining these lists could not be a manual process. Students move between rooms all the time and it would take a full-time person just to keep up with the changes. Further, we already have this data in our student information system, and I’m a huge believer in reusing existing information. Here are the steps we took to meet our goal:

Purchased Active Directory Bulk Users from Dovestones Software. I’ll hype these guys all day and night. They’re providing an outstanding and powerful product at a fantastic price. AD Bulk Users is a product that imports and modifies users in Active Directory.

Using the list of supported Active Directory attributes provides in AD Bulk Users’ documentation, created a SQL view that pulls the appropriate information from our student information system. For AD Bulk Users to work, the SQL view field names must match Active Directory attributes. We’re using the extended, user-defined Active Directory attributes for our needs. Further, we store every user’s SAM account name in our student information system and store their student ID in Active Directory so we have an easy way to link the records.

Ran AD Bulk against this view to synchronize user information.

Using Active Directory Users and Computer, created dozens of query-based distribution groups. A group was created, for example, for each dorm on campus, and for each fraternity. The query is based on the extended attributes we created in the previous step.

After a few days of testing and manually running the process, automated it using the Windows Task Scheduler.

re: Cloud Computing in Education - (a non-technical business case)

Jeff Nuckolls — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 01:11:08 GMT

This post is more about Cloud Computing for the Business of Education/Administration and not so much related 1-to-1 computing with students.

While this post is a bit dated, Cloud Computing today has since matured and we've seen very real evidence that shows sizable cost savings (excessive of 400% many times). While most Cloud Computing vendors show a savings on capital expenses, Microsoft's cloud platform (Windows Azure) has demonstrated saving in both capital and operational expenses.

For education these cost reductions are too significant to ignore... especially with all the cost cutting these days. This blog uses a generic scenario to describe some procedural solutions possible with the cloud, but the BIG picture is cost.

re: Cloud Computing in Education - (a non-technical business case)

neeli — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 21:04:23 GMT

Let's be clear: There is much we still do not know about the impact of investments in this area, and the related costs. We do not have a good handle on how to measure the types of impacts we hope to bring about through the introduction of '1-to-1 computing', which often go beyond what is measured through existing standardized assessments of learning. With very few exeptions, there are very limited data published to help us understand the costs of such initiatives, especially those related to the total cost of operation over time, and the way such costs are calculated are often not very transparent.

re: Step-by-step Introduction to LINQ to SQL

Rafat — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:18:31 GMT

You are the best..this is what I was searching a fresh start of LINQ implementation....searched on different sites but no where practical...your article gave me a start up to do more research on the given topic.

Thanks

Rafat

re: ColdFusion to ASP.NET Migration

akhlaq — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 07:38:00 GMT

asp.net required in my mobily office

re: Biztalk POP3 Adapter and WSS Adapter Example

Shaik Ghyasuddin — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 07:46:15 GMT

Hi Jeffnuck,

Excellent Sample...!

Thanks for saving our time.

Regards

re: Synchronize Active Directory to ADAM with ADAMSync (step-by-step)

dennis — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:08:17 GMT

@Markus

It is quit plain to me. You've added the wrong data in the xml-config.

re: Synchronize Active Directory to ADAM with ADAMSync (step-by-step)

Markus — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:36:47 GMT

I am getting an error (1355 access denied) with the last step (no. 6) - any help appriciated. Thank you.

re: Synchronize Active Directory to ADAM with ADAMSync (step-by-step)

Farouk — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:54:20 GMT

Hello,

I'm running syncrhronization succesfully, however I need to know if there is a way how to schedule it, maybe using the config file!

Any help is welcome...

re: New Azure screencasts and videos available

paekiss — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:50:32 GMT

Thank for guide