News

Lansing CC Implements Mycroft Identity Management System Based on Oracle Security Platform

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/27/09

Lansing Community College has implemented an identity-management system from Mycroft that will guide how the school grants and manages network access across its several campuses and learning centers.

"We determined that our prior identity management system required some operational improvements, particularly to reflect the fact that, as a community college, we tend to build more short-term student relationships than four-year institutions," says Christopher Bennett, director of information security. "One of the challenges we faced was unnecessarily maintaining hundreds of on-line accounts for people who requested information but never wound up applying to our college. Mycroft was able to give us a far more efficient, consistent, and automated process, tailored specifically for higher-education institutions."

According to Bennett, the college, which has 35,000 users, has already gained efficiencies from the Mycroft system, including provisioning for new students and employees that feeds automatically into several downstream systems, reducing work for the college's IT staff. He said that the institution will likely add de-provisioning support for some systems in the near future, as well as expand the number of connected systems it manages.

The Mycroft application is built on Oracle Identity Manager, providing an enhanced user interface and Oracle templates specifically for the higher education environment. According to documentation on the vendor's Web site, the software in this bundle is $60,000; the maintenance agreement is $13,200 for the first year; and implementation services are $60,000.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL also uses the Mycroft solution.