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Login.Point helps East Riding College free up 2 members of staff from permanent password reset duties

The costs involved in password management have been well documented by a number of studies over the years. But, due to the fact that they are hidden i.e. they use up the time of already paid for IT staff, these costs tend to be overlooked. In such cost conscious times where everybody is looking to do more with less, an investment in this area can provide a very rapid return and help to improve efficiency and service.

These savings can be magnified when an establishment is spread over more than one site. East Riding College has over 1,000 computers located across 4 sites in East Yorkshire at Bridlington, Beverly, Carnaby and Hull. Dealing with user account setup, administration and password resets was taking up more and more of the IT department's time. Steve White, IT technician at East Riding College explains the problem,

"Every student forgets their password at some point. With all the users that we have across the 4 sites we effectively had to dedicate 2 members of our staff to do nothing but deal with password resets. In addition to this we had the spike at the start of the academic year where we had to set up new accounts and delete old ones."

"This was not a good use of an expensive and highly trained resource. We wanted to be able to free up our staff to do other tasks that could help improve the service we could provide to our users."

Elegant solution to password problems

This driver led the College to look for a solution that would automate account creation and administration as well as providing self-service for the users to enable password resets, freeing up IT staff from this task. After a thorough review of the options available the College decided to implement Login.Point from Netmania IT.

Login.Point is designed to remove all of the headaches by making account creation and password resets entirely self-service with the swipe of a student's ID card. Basically it works by:

• Checking that the student is a valid user against the College's student database
• Creating accounts based on data from the student database
• Ensuring students are still enrolled at each password reset

The system was set up to work with the existing ID card system that controlled library access and went live in 2006. Later, when the College upgraded to a Smartcard access system Login.Point was integrated to work seamlessly with this.

Automatic account creation

"Login.Point solved the problem of password resets immediately", said Steve White. But this was not the only area where it has helped. "Normally at the start of the academic year we would spend all our time just setting up new accounts. Now the student just swipes their card into the Login.Point till and the system checks to see that they are a valid student. Based on their course code, accounts are automatically created on each system that the student needs access to. In around seven seconds a ticket is printed at the till and the student can log in with those credentials straight away."

Password resets are dealt with in the same way with a simple swipe of the card at the till. Due to the success of Login.Point it was decided to expand the scope of the system by adding printer accounting functionally during 2007. Providing a cashless print service for users in any large scale organisation can be a logistical and accounting nightmare. The sheer number of devices, users and physical locations means a disproportionate amount of time can be spent accounting for relatively small value transactions. Fortunately Netmania were able to provide a solution. Their Pay.Station product removes the need for students to wait for technicians to manually hand out print credits when they run out. Attached to Login.Point it allows the student to simply scan their ID card, insert appropriate funds into Pay.Station and to enable their print credits to be updated automatically.

Extending the scope of the system

Plans are now in place to extend the Login.Point and Pay.Station solution to cover 500 staff as well as the 2500 students at the College. This will take place when their records are moved from the existing manual system to be incorporated into the student database.