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Quick Facts
ACCO Brands Corporation (ACCO Brands), one of the world's largest suppliers of branded office products,
needed to find a simple and cost effective way to link and maintain address information for over 4,000
employees across multiple Microsoft® Exchange (MS Exchange) organizations with different
configurations; a situation that was the result of the Company's merger with General Binding (GBC).
ACCO Brands used Imanami's GroupID Self-Service, an innovative Web-based Directory Management
solution, to complete this task.
Customer Profile
Juilliard is well known across the globe for outstanding dance, drama and music. The school
commemorates its 100th birthday in 2006 with a season-long celebration including world premiere
performances of 47 music, dance, and drama commissions. Since opening in October 1905 as the Institute
of Musical Art, Juilliard has set this country's standard for education in the performing arts. As it enters its
2nd century, Juilliard continues to expand its student and alumni services, curriculum, outreach programs,
and its long-range planning and $150 million capital Campaign for Juilliard. The school represents the
finest in performing arts education, growing with and responding to the needs of a thriving cultural
community in the U.S. and abroad, its student body drawn from 45 states and 44 foreign countries.
Its combined student body and staff are now over 2,000 strong and to keep pace, the school has built a
world-class technical network as the backbone to its day-to-day operations. As Juilliard expands, the need
for technology increases for everything from student records and class schedules to finance and payroll.
As a result, its IT department has had to seek innovative ways to manage the ever-changing data.
Business Situation
The original system for Juilliard, called Colleague, is a Unix-based one, but the email and directory
information is managed via Microsoft Exchange. While the Unix system is the point of origin for all
changes, the Exchange system is what gets tapped for day-to-day use by the approximately 2,000 users.
Manually managing changes for such a large number of accounts is an enormous time-sink for both the
Human Resources and IT departments. There are several types of changes, including new account
creation, updates to existing accounts and account termination. Before Imanami, at the beginning of each
Fall semester approximately 200 new accounts needed to be created manually. The IT staff had to start this
process approximately 2 weeks before the semester began to create the accounts and update the
directories. Once that was completed, another group had to proofread everything very carefully, which
took another full week. This was an incredibility inefficient, tedious and time consuming process; and only
addressed new accounts. There were also countless changes that needed to be made to existing accounts,
plus account terminations due to turnover of students and faculty.
To make matters worse, these updates were duplicate entries to those already made in the Unix system by
the Human Resources department. Accounts needed to be maintained in both systems and there was no
good way to synchronize the information with the existing tools.
In addition, there was an enormous need to find better tools for managing distribution lists and security
groups. Once the account changes were made, the appropriate updates would need to be manually made
to the distribution lists. Every time someone changed departments, got promoted, graduated or
otherwise left the school, a group would need to be updated.
Juilliard's IT group needed a way to automate the interconnectivity between the two systems and
allow for dynamic group management.
Solution
Juilliard found Imanami's GroupID Synchronize and GroupID Automate to address its information
management problems and after a short trial purchased the software.
The implementation went very smoothly. "We did not have any problems installing and setting-up
the software and it has been running very smoothly ever since. The issues we dealt with related to
matching our internal processes to what was needed to make synchronization work," said Jeremy
Pinquist, network manager, The Juilliard School.
Imanami's GroupID Synchronize provides significant wins in Identity Management projects by
delivering meta-directory benefits from existing investments in Microsoft Active Directory (AD).
GroupID Synchronize turns AD into an authoritative repository for identity information by
synchronizing most databases and identity stores with AD. By utilizing transforms (scripting) in the
product, GroupID Synchronize also provides the capability for provisioning and de-provisioning,
and can map business processes to automation.
GroupID Automate is a powerful yet easy-to-use application that dynamically maintains
distribution lists based on rules that are applied to directory data. When users' directory
information changes, GroupID Automate automatically updates the appropriate distribution lists.
GroupID Automate creates and updates distribution lists and security groups using rule-defined
LDAP queries, taking group management to a whole new level by providing an easy-touse
interface, scheduled updates and automatic group creation.
These two products were the perfect answer to Juilliard's data challenges. GroupID Synchronize
solved the interconnectivity issue between the Unix and Microsoft environments and GroupID
Automateautomated management of the distribution lists. Now, the systems are automatically
updated every 2 hours and IT is virtually hands-free.
In addition, these products satisfy the need for state-of-the-art security. Security is very important
to Juilliard because some of the information in the Unix system is highly sensitive as it contains
confidential personal information and financial records.
According to Jeremy, "GroupID Synchronize allows us to capture an ID # from the Unix system and
use that to identify individual accounts, make the updates and simultaneously update or create
distribution lists. This way we do not need to unnecessarily expose sensitive data and can easily
meet SOX compliance by maintaining an auditable trail of the information." "We are very happy
with both Imanami products and hope to use GroupID Synchronize in the future for other
database synchronization," Jeremy added.
Return on Investment
Before implementing Imanami's GroupID Synchronize and GroupID Automate all of the changes
to the over 2,000 accounts, plus any distribution lists were manual. Not only were they manual,
they were made twice, once by Human Resources and once by IT. The IT group alone saves weeks
of work on new account creation at the beginning of every year. On its own, saving that time is
priceless, not to mention the endless other hours spent on daily changes throughout the rest of
the year.
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