Minnetonka Public Schools Implements Tools4ever’s User Management Resource Administrator to Save the District Time, Money and Resources


Seattle, WA – Sept. 5, 2012 — Tools4ever, the market leader in identity and access management solutions, today announced that Minnetonka Public Schools, of Minnetonka, Minnesota, has successfully implemented its User Management Resource Administrator (UMRA). Tools4ever’s URMA solution allows users to benefit from creating, updating and deleting user accounts rapidly and uniformly with automation delegated to the helpdesk, internal department leads or end users.

Minnetonka, a district encompassing nine schools in the greater Minneapolis metro area with more than 9,000 students and 1,400 employees, currently serves 10 communities with six elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school. Minnetonka implemented Tools4ever’s UMRA to automate the daunting task of account provisioning and to ensure all user accounts (students, parents and teachers) are created quickly and without error.

Prior to implementing UMRA, Minnetonka Public Schools used a home-grown, in-house solution to manage its population’s user accounts. According to district officials, the in-house system wasn’t meeting its needs and was unable to interface with Google Apps, for example.

In addition, managing the account creation process was very time consuming as up to five people were involved in creating each account for each user.

“The human resources department no longer has to contact the IT department about account creation and can simply rely on UMRA to automatically create accounts each night,” said Aaron Farley, network engineer at Minnetonka Public Schools. “UMRA allows us to be more hands off and eliminate a lot of steps and also has prevented many errors previously caused by manual processes.”

With Tools4ver’s UMRA in place, only one person handles the account management process, which will save the district thousands of dollars and employee hours each year. New student data is entered into Minnetonka’s Skyward Information System and the student user accounts are automatically provisioned by UMRA. Accounts are then automatically created by UMRA at a pre-determined point in time in Google Apps and all other applications that the district needs to populate.

“Tools4ever uses a phased implementation of UMRA, and offers a massive database of predefined procedures in which it can operate within an environment,” said Dean Wiech, managing director of Tools4ever. “This allows our customers to see results within a few days and achieve a return on initial investment in an average of just four months.

“As in Minnetonka’s case, UMRA allowed the district to create tremendous internal efficiencies in less than one week and reduced its dependency on manual processes, thus creating additional cost savings for all the schools in the system,” said Wiech.

During the phased-in implementation, organizations like Minnetonka Public Schools are able to realize benefits from day one by addressing the primary objective of the project, with additional features added with each phase. Within a matter of days, UMRA is able to provide organizations will have an end-to-end automated identity and access management solution.

For more information about Tools4ever, visit http://www.tools4ever.com. For more information about UMRA, visit: http://www.tools4ever.com/products/user-management-resource-administrator/

About Minnetonka School District
The Minnetonka Public School District is a high-performing school district serving families in all or part of 10 communities: Minnetonka, Chanhassen, Deephaven, Eden Prairie, Excelsior, Greenwood, Shorewood, Tonka Bay, Victoria and Woodland. Together, the 10 communities have provided support for the children and programs in the Minnetonka Public Schools. The district serves about 9,000 students in grades K-12. In addition, its birth-to-5 Early Childhood Family Education Program serves families and children during the most critical early developmental years. In all, more than 20,000 learners of all ages take advantage of educational opportunities offered through its community education and recreation programs. The district’s relatively small size and commitment to quality means it can personalize each child’s education to meet his or her individual needs.

About Tools4ever
Tools4ever distinguishes itself with a no-nonsense approach and a low Total Cost of Ownership. In contrast to comparable Identity & Access Management solutions, Tools4ever implements a complete solution in several days rather than weeks or months. Because of this approach, Tools4ever is the undisputed Identity & Access Management market leader, with currently over 5 million managed users. Tools4ever supplies a variety of software products and integrated consultancy services involving identity management, such as user provisioning, RBAC, password management, single sign on and access management. For more information, please visit www.tools4ever.com.

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