Tools4ever
Cost-effective Way to Manage the User Account Lifecycle

Students are increasingly following a trend of accessing the learning content through web—both on personal and school devices. To incorporate this trend, the education institutions need to create user accounts in their district for faculty, staff, students, and often parents, and register the devices they use. It also includes resetting passwords, ensuring access to systems and files the users require, and finally, terminating the accounts of those who leave the school or graduate. The whole process posts challenges to schools to do more with less and that’s where Tools4ever, Inc. comes into the picture. The company offers a complete range of cost-effective and quick-to-implement Identity Management solutions in the field of User Provisioning, Delegation, RBAC (Role-based access control), Password Management, SSO (Single sign-on), and Access Management.

Tools4ever’s User Management Resource Administrator (UMRA) gives educational institutions the ability to completely automate the user account lifecycle. By taking feeds from the Student Information System and Human Resource System, it automatically creates accounts, updates, disables, and eventually deletes them from Active Directory. “With connectors to a multitude of other applications, such as Google, Office 365 and Blackboard, we can also automate the user account process in these systems as well,” says Jacques Vriens, Founder and CEO, Tools4ever. Another product, Self Service Reset Password Management (SSRPM) allows users to reset a forgotten password without the need to call the helpdesk. Users enroll in SSRPM by providing answers to a series of customizable challenge questions, and correctly provide answers to these questions when they need to reset their password. Further, these passwords can easily be synched to other applications, such as email or eLearning systems, providing a higher level of convenience to end users.

Tools4ever’s account lifecycles management solutions have found their place in some of the reputed education institutions, including MassBay Community College, Columbia University and many K-12 organizations.

We offer a complete range of cost-effective and quick-to-implement Identity Management solutions

Another factor that makes Tools4ever alluring to the schools and colleges is its implementation time. “Instead of requiring months to accomplish a project, we can complete customer requirement in a matter of days. This helps realize the immediate benefits of the products along with quicker ROI,” says Dean Wiech, MD, Tools4ever-East.

The company has helped one of its clients, Fitchburg State College, a comprehensive public university committed to providing affordable education. The college with a population of over 6,500 students and 520 employees had over 40,000 records in their Active Directory, including the stale accounts that were no longer needed. After several attempts to delete accounts based on inactivity ended up in deletion of hundreds of active users, they realized they needed help. While most options they evaluated were expensive and complicated, “UMRA from Tools4ever offered a really easy solution with a phenomenal support staff,” stated Sherry Horeanopoulos, Information Security Officer, Fitchburg State College. With UMRA, the college saw 75 percent reduction in time spent on managing accounts as well as reduction in error of creating and deleting accounts.

Going forward, Tools4ever will continue delivering cost-effective solutions that are quick to implement for customers around the globe. “We plan to expand our products in a manner that will allow us to focus on the different needs of each vertical with a special focus on education,” says Vriens. As part of its road map, the company is gearing up to release another product, Web SSO by end of the year, which will provide a single sign on solution that is viable for the education space.