Australian university reaps agility in IT overhaul

09.02.2006
Upgrading and configuring some 6500 desktops later this year will finalize the University of Adelaide's A$2 million (US$1.48 million) IT transformation project aimed at unifying its disparate infrastructure.

Martin Barbary, the university's strategic initiatives manager, told Computerworld the organization's IT architecture has been changing for the past two years and involved everything from back-end systems to identity management.

"We have a desktop SOE and will enforce that, but a lot of it is about the meta-directory implementation and consolidated security," Barbary said. "We will have same sign-on but not necessarily single sign-on."

The PeopleSoft student administration system will remain as the "master, unique identifier" for everyone at the university and data will flow through a meta-directory to a "multitude of systems".

Novell's Nsure and eDirectory products will be used but NetWare will be dropped and Microsoft's Active Directory will become the main directory server.

"We will still use [Novell's] Zenworks to make management of clients easier, but people will start authenticating against Active Directory," Barbary said, adding the Novell systems will be swapped to a NAS environment. "We purchased an EMC NAS after a full evaluation. This backs onto the EMC SANs."