Grant MacEwan College

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Quick, easy and reliable access to information on the Web is a standard college students have come to expect from their institutions. Tools to retrieve e-mail, library, course information and application status are just a few of the basic essentials necessary to help manage a student’s demanding academic life. But administering, managing and storing all this data is no easy feat and can strain a college’s IT resources.

Despite facing IT challenges similar to those faced by many academic institutions, the efforts paid off for Alberta's largest college, Grant MacEwan College. Recognizing the needs of its growing student and faculty base, MacEwan transformed its disparate legacy information systems into the feature-rich, user-friendly myMacewan.ca Web portal. It now provides students with one-stop access to their entire academic information needs, such as registration, online learning, library resources, e-mail, campus news, and a discussion board.

When the decision came to create the portal, the focus was to improve not only the way students and faculty access information, but to make it easier for the IT staff to manage and support the new system. To address both concerns, MacEwan turned to Sun Microsystems and its Sun Java Enterprise System (Java ES).

“The portal presented us with an opportunity to create a profound cultural shift within the school and in the way people access and use information on the Web,” said John McGrath, Chief Technology Officer at MacEwan.

Single Sign-on to an Integrated Portal
MacEwan chose to integrate its enterprise identity infrastructure with the Sun Java System Directory Server, part of the Sun Java ES. The directory server provides a solid foundation as a repository for storing and managing identity profiles, portal access privileges, and application and network resource information. It integrates smoothly into multi-platform environments including UNIX, Linux and Microsoft Windows systems.

Features like the single sign-on capability now enable users to log into the portal once and, based on their identity, access all the services available to them. Everyone involved with the school has some level of access to the Web portal.

The college built the portal environment on two Sun Fire V40z servers running Solaris 10 Operating System. There are also four Sun Fire V20z servers in a “corral” that serve the development and staging environment, with one V20z dedicated to content management.

Proof Lay in the Concept
Before signing up for the new portal, MacEwan worked with Sun on a pilot project to prove the strength of the system and the concept of a portal. “The amount of support Sun offered early on gave us the opportunity to present a proof of concept,” said McGrath.

The overall response to the portal from students and faculty has been very positive. Since the consolidation of the system, which started six months ago, the portal has had on average 4,600 log-ins a day, and about 10,000 unique students a week. “There were a lot of services that might have been hidden away in the past that are now being found through the portal,” said McGrath. “And because we have built-in agility, we can build out more services.”