Name:

Purpose:

Requirement:

Royal Agriculture College has an in house built, student records system based on Microsoft SQL2000. A third party package had previously been used to create and remove user accounts, mailboxes, profiles, home directories and security groupings for students.

This worked well at the beginning of each term, as new students arrived and graduates left. With late starters and returning students the system got rather cumbersome. Having to export and run the system again and again, wasn’t hitting the right buttons for them. Such a long winded task influenced the decision to explore a new system which would allow students to be deleted and late comers to be added by the click of a button.

Deciding the requirements of the new system, allowed the college to realise they really need a system that could cut out mundane tasks for them. The Royal Agriculture College aspired for their systems to:

• Identify users that needed creating.
• Create these users in a specified OU with a mailbox, home directory, and profile path and security group membership
• Create the distribution groups for every course and module run in the current year at the College. Also to set controls on who was able to email to these groups – i.e. only staff can email these groups, not students themselves!
• Automatically assign students to distribution groups based on the course and modules they were registered on from our MIS, and update this nightly
• Specifying the storage group and mailing server used for these students
• Specifying the security groups the students would be members of on creation
• Identify graduate students who needed to be removed from Active Directory
• Select some or all of the students and deleting their user accounts, home directories, mailboxes and profiles from the servers
• Take student mailboxes out to an individual pst file in their home directory so it can be zipped and passed on to the students if necessary

Solution:

Kingsfield IT Solutions was approached to design a program which would enable the college to meet all of their requirements using one package.

The queries were created in house to pull out the relevant information from Kingsfield’s MIS system.

Specifications:

A student management system was required by Royal Agriculture College to work in conjunction with their existing software called Tracker.

A solution for adding deleting and & modifying active directory user accounts.

Key Features:

This project is divided into 3 stages i.e. User Interface, Business Logic and the Storage.

User Interface:

It contains the actual screens for the application; these screens are present in the Application project named Tracker.

Business Logic:

The Business logic stage is the actual implementation of all the tasks that a user wants to perform. This is done from a windows service called Tracker Service.

This concept of separating the user interface from the actual logic is used for user access right purpose, i.e. any user can open an application but only an administrator can perform the actual task.

The rights of the Windows Service will always be of an administrator and the user may or may not have the administrative rights.

Storage:

This is where the implementation is affected. This can be an Active Directory and even a Database.

Implementation:

Applications used:

Microsoft Windows 2003 Standard Edition

Technologies Used:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 - VB.NET SQL Server 2000 Microsoft Exchange Server

Key Challenges:

The main developing tracker ADM were:-

• Overcoming permissions issues on users home directories
• The server was migrated for 2000 to 2003 which cause a few unforeseen circumstances
• Exmerge was quote temperamental and needed to be configured in a specific way

Feedback from Client:

Richard Blunden, IT Manager, The Royal Agricultural College

The guys were quick to get to work on the system and came up with a very clear, clean interface for us to use.

Once we had ironed out a few of the problems with the connectivity to our system we emerged from the project with an easy to use system which makes our life a lot easier when it comes to the management of our students. Many of the tasks are automated, and now it is no problem at all going in to the system and at the click of a button know that everything is ready for the students to get on to the system. Removing students is so much easier too, and it now means that if any are removed accidentally due to the MIS being used incorrectly by staff, we don’t lose all the work of the students, we can still get it back for them and get them back on the system.

Kingsfield’s Software head came over to us to discuss in detail what was required, and this proved to be a great help in getting across our requirements. There is nothing like a face to face meeting to iron out the nuances of a bespoke system! Granted we did hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, but Ashish and the other developers worked on the system long hours to get the package working, and when it did work, it was great!

Many thanks to all at Kingsfield for the long hours put in to getting the system working for us, and showing the commitment to get it working as we required.