Avon Maitland District School Board

Avon Maitland District School Board needed a better way to effectively manage the constant changes of staff and students. The school board was looking to automate this process by implementing a system that would read their HR and Student Management System, a SQL database, to check for any changes or additions and update their Active Directory system automatically through SSIS.

THE CHALLENGE

The Avon Maitland School Board did not have any integration system in place between their HR system and Active Directory. In order for changes to incur in Active Directory, the IT Department needed to manually update the system and relied on someone from the HR Department informing them of the necessary changes that needed to be made. This resulted in delays for the staff and students as it could take up to a week for the IT Department to be notified. The School Board needed to set-up a system that would use the data from their HR and Student Management Systems to update Active Directory automatically in order to eliminate these delays.

Initially Avon Maitland District School Board was considering hiring a developer to customize an automated solution which would have been a highly costly endeavor and taken several months to implement. When the school board first inquired about the SSIS Integration Toolkit for Directory Services they were unfamiliar with SSIS, by working with KingswaySoft and enrolling in their training course they were able to quickly learn an unfamiliar platform and begin developing their integration project.

The school board wanted the solution to recognize if a record needed to be created or updated in Active Directory based on the information coming from the HR system. For this scenario the school board was able to take advantage of KingswaySoft’s Upsert capability built into the AD Destination Component. The Upsert functionality checks the record coming from the source to see it is already exists in Active Directory, if it does not, the component will create a new record in Active Directory and if it does exist, it will update the record in Active Directory with the necessary changes. This Upsert capability offered the school board a highly performant way of running their daily integration job and allowed for a simplified SSIS project by eliminating the need for extra components and processes to run this check.