Private School Simplifies SSO and Reduces Parent Login Problems

Benefits

• “Set-it-and-forget-it” architecture with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integration
• Accelerated and user-friendly access to a broad range of apps
• Reduced support calls from parents
• Simplified parent, student and staff logins

The Story

When the Glennie School began its search for an identity and access management (IAM) solution, they recognized the need to streamline user experience for their 2,000 users on multiple apps.

Matthew Russell, Information Technology Manager at Glennie, said, “The IT department transitioned an eight-year investment in Microsoft SharePoint to Google Sites and Google Drive, aiming to consolidate and simplify the user and management experience. The goal was to create a single web portal with a maximum of three clicks from that landing page for the user to reach the information they were seeking. Due to the major navigation overhaul, the school faced SSO challenges.”

“Many products offer different SSO standards, from SAML to OAuth, to many others in between. Some products do not even support a standard,” continues Russell.

OneLogin: Simple and secure

The school reviewed several IAM providers as the deadline for their transition grew closer. Glennie selected OneLogin as the best match for the school’s specific set of needs. The “set-in-and-forget-it” IAM is one of their longest-used solutions.

“One of the longest standing vendor relationships we've had is with OneLogin,” says Russell. “We found that OneLogin protection is easier, and it just works really well compared to a lot of other multifactor authentication tools out there.”

Streamlining student logins

The Glennie School students benefit from OneLogin through not only its secure multi-factor authentication (MFA), but also its single sign-on (SSO) feature, which allows users to simply log on once and not require different passwords for multiple different apps.

The simple sign-on process also helps their youngest users, who are just learning to read and write. “Our Junior School, in particular, subscribes and uses many such online resources. This allowed us to simplify the number of usernames and passwords for our Kindergarten and Year 1 students. That was important as they are only beginning to learn how to read and write, let alone remember passwords as well,” adds Russell.

Improving parent communication

Parent login issues are a well-known problem in the educational community. But not for parents and guardians of students at The Glennie School – with OneLogin.

Because the school provides parents a Google Workspace email address for parent communication, they needed a way to keep messages, documents, forms and calendar events secure. A OneLogin integration solved that problem.

“OneLogin allows us to have a closed environment, complete with a secure perspective and document sharing so that we can share documents with our parents’ school-based email addresses,” Russell explains. “It just works really well.”

OneLogin also solved the parent login issues the school had been facing. “With OneLogin launch app links, we now easily create custom links for the school’s Google Apps resources, which automatically sign the parent out of their personal account in the browser and sign them in with their school credentials. This all happens without interfering with the parent's saved browser credentials,” says Russell. “Eliminating support calls we used to get from parents unable to access email links more than compensates for the time spent creating a OneLogin launch link for each app parents use.”

Optimizing staff and IT workflow

Not only does OneLogin streamline communication for parents and students, it also reduces support calls to IT staff. But that’s not the only way The Glennie school uses it to save time for their faculty.

“We had a weird scenario last year – our payroll system doesn’t cater to employees that have multiple roles in the school. They might be a teacher as well as a sporting coach and something else as well, but we didn’t want to have to give them multiple email addresses and logins,” Russell explains. They worked around this with OneLogin tools like just-in-time provisioning and custom field parameters to populate the employee data from the old payroll system into OneLogin – creating a special link for each employee. This way, the employee could easily switch from one role to another. “It was OneLogin that saved the day,” said Russell.

It also came in handy for The Glennie School regarding authentication for their school’s mobile app, and for when staff members forgot devices – for which the IT team can utilize OneLogin to issue a temporary code that allows access.

Especially when dealing with the school’s transition entirely to Chrome OS, OneLogin has been essential. “It’s been our trajectory since 2006 to be SaaS entirely,” says Russell, who also explains the school’s need for access management that integrated with both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. “It allows us to have control over the entire community of online activity. That way we know anything suspicious is outside of that OneLogin bubble.”

Conclusion

The MFA, communication and provisioning features of OneLogin enabled The Glennie School to keep access manageable, communication streamlined and identities secure. So much so that they’ve kept the relationship up for years.

“If a school was looking to outsource identity management to a provider,” says Russell, “we would definitely recommend OneLogin based on our experience.”